Brendan Eich donated money to support California Proposition 8, i.e.: to make it the law to discriminate against people of the same sex who want to marry.
Proposition 8 was intended to do nothing except codify the status quo: the term "marriage" refers to a union between a single man and a single woman. Progressives' manifest intent to try to change the situation on the ground before it was voted on is irrelevant to the intent of the Initiative.
The inner city areas and lack of digital food payments is the real tipping point for the US.
Indeed. One doesn't need to be a survivalist or even a so-called "prepper" to see the problems there. Anyone 30 y/o or older in California should have the presence of mind to remember their earthquake preparedness stuff: Emergency cash in small bills, 72 hours minimum food/water/meds/supplies (preferably at least a week or more), a "bug out bag", a POTS land line, etc...
The problem is the younger ones. They a) haven't had to deal with a major earthquake in their lifetime, were kind of bewildered 5 years ago by the blackout but didn't internalize it, and have absolutely no critical thinking skills for life beyond smartphones and disconnected from the internet. With no preparation and no cash on hand, they have no ready assets for bartering or anything else. That becomes a problem in a matter of 24-36 hours, not weeks.
If a federal grid moves in with real cash payback for solar or no connection fee for off grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., what will a local monopoly do that was banking on new fees and charges to its "herd" of power users?
There's nothing wrong with being on the grid; urbanization is one of the hallmarks of civilization. Self-sufficiency and contingency plans are a virtue, though.
let someone know they're being Pushed out the door for not toeing the party line on some Social Justice issue unrelated to javascript compiler speed? Cause Mozilla clearly already had that feature
JFC, there's an entire segment of the tech industry that doesn't seem to live in the real world.
Having more things hooked up together doesn't make things more reliable, it makes them more vulnerable to both common mode failures and cascading system collapses.
The fragility of our nation's power grid and the lack of cross-connects are two separate issues, but there's NO WAY that the second should even be remotely considered until the inter-reliability of the systems that ARE connected is fixed. And then maybe about 10 years after someone claims it's fixed we *perhaps* consider taking the next step.
In practice this is a minor and pointless change - almost anyone who sees evidence of child pornography will already be inclined to report it voluntarily if given an easy and anonymous way to do it.
The real point of the law is to strengthen the idea that people in non-law enforcement professions can be forced into acting as police. Next, teachers who hear students talk about violence are forced to report the student to the authorities. Librarians who lend out books about Islamic extremism must notify DHS.
It's a path to curtail civil liberties, and of course it starts with child pornography. Because who's for child abuse?
I'm assuming it varies state-to-state, but in California I'm already a mandatory reporter as an EMT for abuse, teachers are already mandatory reporters in many places, as are certain other professions. Although I certainly understand the search-and-seizure concerns around this, frankly I see it as a positive for IT professionals. Congratulations, guys, "IT" is growing up and is expected to be Doing The Right Thing. Maybe in a few more years "Software Engineering" will have some requirements too, like any other field that uses that term.
And yes, child pornography is contraband. Period. Has been for a very, very long time. The IT professional is in possession of it at that moment, and frankly should want to get it out of their hands as quickly as humanly possible.
IMO this is much, much more about instilling responsibility into IT workers than it is "expanding the scope" of something that's already fairly well expanded to begin with... We've already had the debate about child abuse, and child pornography. We as a society are willing to enforce FAR more heavily restrictions and preventative steps around that than we are for virtually any other crime. And there's a reason for that.
This way every phone and laptop with Wifi enabled is an active radio beacon that permanently broadcasts a unique identifier. On many devices this is even the case when Wifi is turned off, but the service for Wifi assisted positioning is enabled. The craziest thing is that none of the active scanning is technically necessary, because the clients could just passively listen for the beacon frames that the access points broadcast (by default 10 times per second).
THIS. I wish I had mod points, because this deserves two. I'd love for more devices to do this passively. Be active when I hit the "Scan for Wifi Networks" button (maybe), but otherwise just listen to what's going on. For OS's that seem to think that not responding to an ICMP ping is a valuable end-user feature, you'd think more of them would offer this already.
Fedora upgrades have become more stable and reliable, mostly because of some brand-new technologies, such as the DNF package manger.
Excuse my while I hurl. dnf from an interface perspective has been nothing but a headache for 2.5 releases, and it STILL can't do the things with reliability that yum did, nor does it have the ecosystem of plugins for people with various edge cases. And don't even get me started about local file system + repo installs.
Going back beyond that, "stable and reliable" is not the track record I would ascribe to anything about Fedora in the last 8 releases, except for maybe SELinux policy (except for the policy *RPM* which had a major clusterf*ck blocking update a couple of releases back).
Fedora brought us such lovely presents like UsrMove, the confusing mish-mash of grub2, and the unholy holy war precipitated by strong-arming the "systemd way of doing thing" from the ground up, so much as restricting RPMs from having *any* SysV support in the spec file.
So Fedora isn't inspiring a lot of confidence with moving to a direct rolling release. Frankly, people that want this might as well just sit on rawhide instead and re-vagrant/chef/devops/continainer their boxes anew each nanosecond.
upstart in SysV compatibility mode, or the shiny upstart features? The Ubuntu side of the house was trying to use upstart as upstart, the Redhat side of the house installed upstart but basically just used it to run SysV scripts. Legacy init -> upstart was almost completely an invisible non-issue for Redhat/Fedora users. People probably thought upstart -> systemd would be similarly handled and have a similar result. I basically did.
Probably because Lennert works for Redhat directly and SystemD is a Redhat project.
Blame Fedora for that more than Redhat. Lack of Redhat oversight (and feedback from the RHEL/Centos userbase) was what led to the inmates running the asylum from Fedora ~15 to Fedora 18, by which time it was too late.
Bill Nottingham and other old hands on fedora-devel should have spoken out against the changes that were occurring. Hopefully they would have, if the "systemd of today" had been what was proposed back in Fedora 14 instead of just "a thing to improve boot times over upstart, which we're not using any advanced features of anyway."
Step 4: Now my boxes are actually getting exploited, and they mostly weren't before.
You hope.
That's orthogonal. (It's also, in many cases, verifiable for web-based exploits. That's what logs are for.)
"Here's a string to look for, and a mitigation strategy until you can patch" or "disable Bluetooth in your car adapter" is still not the same as "here's a script to hack in".
If a temporary process of punishing a product's users by spreading details on how to hurt them is deemed necessary in order for a company to "start treating security seriously", then that's an argument one might make.
If a company is (arguably) already treating security reasonably seriously, then spreading details on how to hurt their customers does not achieve anything. It just spreads misery.
I want customers to get burned enough to change the way companies work with software. If I keep releasing exploits the damage should be maximized to drive as many customers as possible away from them. Eventually that will lead to commercial software development maturing. A few companies might be ran out of business in the process but in the end the Giant Leap Forward will make us better off. With some luck some software I don't like will be killed in the process. Hopefully they will also learn that storing sensitive data like the customers credit card information is a bad design choice. Enough harm needs to be done to innocent third parties who patronize companies I dislike to teach my political enemies or some shit to not store vital information like that.
If a company is (arguably) already treating security reasonably seriously, then spreading details on how to hurt their customers does not achieve anything.
That kind of assumes there aren't malicious people already exploiting the bug.
Sometimes it's better to let people know so they can defend themselves: either by closing a port, changing a configuration, turning off a service, fixing the bugs themselves and recompiling, or switching to another software system.
Bullshit. Spreading details on how to protect yourself is not the same as providing an exploit. In some cases, an exploit is trivial enough to deduce from the mitigation that there's no real way to avoid it -- in most cases, however, it's not.
End users won't be recompiling firmware in their car, and in many or most cases of security bugs, the exploit *IS* the start of widespread use. * Step 1: Someone announces a bug * Step 2: Vendor/discussion/patch cycle/analysis begins * Step 3: Some asshat releases an exploit * Step 4: Now my boxes are actually getting exploited, and they mostly weren't before. Thanks, asshat.
The point I'm trying to make is, the only reason to engage in Step 3 is to force Step 2 by hurting their customers. In which case, guess who's actually hurting their customers... You.
Most people that find vulnerabilities want to tell the manufacturer. But after a long history of being ignored or even being threatened, many have reverted to giving the corporations responsible a fixed, short time to fix things, because otherwise nothing happens. Giving time more time just makes them drag their feet, because fixing vulnerabilities costs money. Those complaining here are at the very root of the problem. I should also point out that this corporate fuck-up has been going on for a few decades now.
You're confusing the goal with the process.
More secure software is the goal.
If a temporary process of punishing a product's users by spreading details on how to hurt them is deemed necessary in order for a company to "start treating security seriously", then that's an argument one might make.
If a company is (arguably) already treating security reasonably seriously, then spreading details on how to hurt their customers does not achieve anything. It just spreads misery.
"For educational use" is as ludicrous and beside the point as "for backup purposes only" was for Hotline servers 15 years ago. If the company has or is in the process of acting reasonably fast, actually spreading the details (as opposed to threatening to spread the details) on how to hack someone just makes you a d-bag whose name will be cursed alongside that of the script kiddie who uses your info to hack someone.
And of course the objection is -- "But don't people who work 20-hour weeks get paid less?" And the point of TFA is that NO -- they still get paid a living wage. The difference in the Keynes future prediction and what we actually got is that that extra money has been siphoned off to the richest folks, rather than rewarding average workers, who might then have to work less hours to still live comfortably.
Now you're equivocating. A 20-hour/week worker lives far more comfortably now than they did in the 1930s. Hell, the average 0-hour/week worker (hey, that includes SSI/Disability) lives far more comfortably now than they did in the 1930s. You can't dissociate the societal benefits from the influx in productivity.
Where does that extra comfort come from? Well, from those Americans who *still are* working 40-hour plus workweeks. We can't all live on marginal costs.
Voice control of things in your apartment doesn't need Internet access to work. We have had voice control since the 1990s.
One of the things I'm happy Apple (and to some extent Google) has begun to offer is offline voice recognition, recognizing that not all of us want our voice recordings sent to the cloud for further processing.
I'm happy people have set up giant neural network voice recognition systems for interpreting what people are saying, using a bazillion cores in a data center, but what I really want is for the algorithm to be implemented local to my house.
Ever seen the auxiliary corps, color guard or flag team of a marching band in the US? The flag ("silk") is ALWAYS affixed to the pole using good, old-fashioned electrical tape. (Black, white, or colored depending on show needs.)
Brand used varies by region and climate, but in California nothing beats Scotch Super 33+.
Rolls of it are in every performer's and coach's bags for use in an emergency, and if you're a roadie/techie, you'll buy a case of it for a season. Pretty funny looks at Home Depot, actually.
A better title might be "Why Hipster Coders Shouldn't Think Super-High-Level JS-Framework-of-the-Month Calls Mean You're a Good Programmer"
It's hard not to extend this to a #kidstoday rant, and I'm by no means arguing to go back to assembly, but at some point forcing large amounts of programming to the lowered-barrier of entry just reduces the percentage of folks who actually know what they're doing and can critically analyze the situation.
If only we could apply this to other works too... I'd love it if all copies of The Communist Manifesto came pre-Fisked. It would help people from getting confused their first year in college.
I'm assuming you're trolling, but HyperTalk was actually pretty awesome for its intended usage. AppleScript is still a great high-level language for describing what would otherwise be completely UI-driven macro integration. Most of the really painful re-engineering of code to deal with Apple Events was done back in the 90s, and Cocoa-only writers were able to leverage that going forward. That being said, it's not a general purpose language... it's a scripting language. HyperCard had some nifty UI built-ins, but it was still a scripting language.
Use the right tool for the right job. For sysadmins, someone who wants to write everything in Shell is probably as bad as the person who doesn't want anything in Shell. (cough*systemd*cough)
I think at this point dipshit #Solutionist Millennials seem like they have developed some form of a messiah complex, in which they believe they have a moral or divine responsibility to be the agent in delivering good to the planet.
Do kids not take Home Ec anymore?
No, they don't. That wasn't offered for much of the 90's (at least in San Diego, CA) and whatever was left was dismantled in the 2000's.
There's a Regional Occupation Program that still provides a path for shop/trades, but I don't believe that's resulted in Home Ec coming back.
Besides, nowadays it'd probably be considered sexist somehow, no matter what the gender ration was.
Brendan Eich donated money to support California Proposition 8, i.e.: to make it the law to discriminate against people of the same sex who want to marry.
Proposition 8 was intended to do nothing except codify the status quo: the term "marriage" refers to a union between a single man and a single woman. Progressives' manifest intent to try to change the situation on the ground before it was voted on is irrelevant to the intent of the Initiative.
The inner city areas and lack of digital food payments is the real tipping point for the US.
Indeed. One doesn't need to be a survivalist or even a so-called "prepper" to see the problems there. Anyone 30 y/o or older in California should have the presence of mind to remember their earthquake preparedness stuff: Emergency cash in small bills, 72 hours minimum food/water/meds/supplies (preferably at least a week or more), a "bug out bag", a POTS land line, etc...
The problem is the younger ones. They a) haven't had to deal with a major earthquake in their lifetime, were kind of bewildered 5 years ago by the blackout but didn't internalize it, and have absolutely no critical thinking skills for life beyond smartphones and disconnected from the internet. With no preparation and no cash on hand, they have no ready assets for bartering or anything else. That becomes a problem in a matter of 24-36 hours, not weeks.
If a federal grid moves in with real cash payback for solar or no connection fee for off grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., what will a local monopoly do that was banking on new fees and charges to its "herd" of power users?
There's nothing wrong with being on the grid; urbanization is one of the hallmarks of civilization. Self-sufficiency and contingency plans are a virtue, though.
let someone know they're being Pushed out the door for not toeing the party line on some Social Justice issue unrelated to javascript compiler speed? Cause Mozilla clearly already had that feature
The last time Science tried to come up with a new de-icer it didn't work out too well...
Just saying.
JFC, there's an entire segment of the tech industry that doesn't seem to live in the real world.
Having more things hooked up together doesn't make things more reliable, it makes them more vulnerable to both common mode failures and cascading system collapses.
5 years ago the entire county of San Diego was knocked off-line for the better part of a day because a power worker in Arizona flipped the wrong switch. The entire NE US was out a decade ago because of a single software bug, and I seem to recall another recent blackout caused by squirrels.
The fragility of our nation's power grid and the lack of cross-connects are two separate issues, but there's NO WAY that the second should even be remotely considered until the inter-reliability of the systems that ARE connected is fixed. And then maybe about 10 years after someone claims it's fixed we *perhaps* consider taking the next step.
In practice this is a minor and pointless change - almost anyone who sees evidence of child pornography will already be inclined to report it voluntarily if given an easy and anonymous way to do it.
The real point of the law is to strengthen the idea that people in non-law enforcement professions can be forced into acting as police. Next, teachers who hear students talk about violence are forced to report the student to the authorities. Librarians who lend out books about Islamic extremism must notify DHS.
It's a path to curtail civil liberties, and of course it starts with child pornography. Because who's for child abuse?
I'm assuming it varies state-to-state, but in California I'm already a mandatory reporter as an EMT for abuse, teachers are already mandatory reporters in many places, as are certain other professions. Although I certainly understand the search-and-seizure concerns around this, frankly I see it as a positive for IT professionals. Congratulations, guys, "IT" is growing up and is expected to be Doing The Right Thing. Maybe in a few more years "Software Engineering" will have some requirements too, like any other field that uses that term.
And yes, child pornography is contraband. Period. Has been for a very, very long time. The IT professional is in possession of it at that moment, and frankly should want to get it out of their hands as quickly as humanly possible.
IMO this is much, much more about instilling responsibility into IT workers than it is "expanding the scope" of something that's already fairly well expanded to begin with... We've already had the debate about child abuse, and child pornography. We as a society are willing to enforce FAR more heavily restrictions and preventative steps around that than we are for virtually any other crime. And there's a reason for that.
I don't doubt it. There should be a mandatory "Reinventing the Wheel" course for all CS majors. Chapter 1, The Amiga. Chapter 2, Lisp. Etcetera.
I wish I had mod points to give to this.
This way every phone and laptop with Wifi enabled is an active radio beacon that permanently broadcasts a unique identifier. On many devices this is even the case when Wifi is turned off, but the service for Wifi assisted positioning is enabled. The craziest thing is that none of the active scanning is technically necessary, because the clients could just passively listen for the beacon frames that the access points broadcast (by default 10 times per second).
THIS. I wish I had mod points, because this deserves two. I'd love for more devices to do this passively. Be active when I hit the "Scan for Wifi Networks" button (maybe), but otherwise just listen to what's going on. For OS's that seem to think that not responding to an ICMP ping is a valuable end-user feature, you'd think more of them would offer this already.
Excuse my while I hurl. dnf from an interface perspective has been nothing but a headache for 2.5 releases, and it STILL can't do the things with reliability that yum did, nor does it have the ecosystem of plugins for people with various edge cases. And don't even get me started about local file system + repo installs.
Going back beyond that, "stable and reliable" is not the track record I would ascribe to anything about Fedora in the last 8 releases, except for maybe SELinux policy (except for the policy *RPM* which had a major clusterf*ck blocking update a couple of releases back).
Fedora brought us such lovely presents like UsrMove, the confusing mish-mash of grub2, and the unholy holy war precipitated by strong-arming the "systemd way of doing thing" from the ground up, so much as restricting RPMs from having *any* SysV support in the spec file.
So Fedora isn't inspiring a lot of confidence with moving to a direct rolling release. Frankly, people that want this might as well just sit on rawhide instead and re-vagrant/chef/devops/continainer their boxes anew each nanosecond.
Because upstart was shit.
upstart in SysV compatibility mode, or the shiny upstart features? The Ubuntu side of the house was trying to use upstart as upstart, the Redhat side of the house installed upstart but basically just used it to run SysV scripts. Legacy init -> upstart was almost completely an invisible non-issue for Redhat/Fedora users. People probably thought upstart -> systemd would be similarly handled and have a similar result. I basically did.
Probably because Lennert works for Redhat directly and SystemD is a Redhat project.
Blame Fedora for that more than Redhat. Lack of Redhat oversight (and feedback from the RHEL/Centos userbase) was what led to the inmates running the asylum from Fedora ~15 to Fedora 18, by which time it was too late.
Bill Nottingham and other old hands on fedora-devel should have spoken out against the changes that were occurring. Hopefully they would have, if the "systemd of today" had been what was proposed back in Fedora 14 instead of just "a thing to improve boot times over upstart, which we're not using any advanced features of anyway."
Step 4: Now my boxes are actually getting exploited, and they mostly weren't before.
You hope.
That's orthogonal. (It's also, in many cases, verifiable for web-based exploits. That's what logs are for.)
"Here's a string to look for, and a mitigation strategy until you can patch" or "disable Bluetooth in your car adapter" is still not the same as "here's a script to hack in".
You're confusing the goal with the process.
More secure software is the goal.
If a temporary process of punishing a product's users by spreading details on how to hurt them is deemed necessary in order for a company to "start treating security seriously", then that's an argument one might make.
If a company is (arguably) already treating security reasonably seriously, then spreading details on how to hurt their customers does not achieve anything. It just spreads misery.
I want customers to get burned enough to change the way companies work with software.
If I keep releasing exploits the damage should be maximized to drive as many customers as possible away from them.
Eventually that will lead to commercial software development maturing.
A few companies might be ran out of business in the process but in the end the Giant Leap Forward will make us better off. With some luck some software I don't like will be killed in the process.
Hopefully they will also learn that storing sensitive data like the customers credit card information is a bad design choice. Enough harm needs to be done to innocent third parties who patronize companies I dislike to teach my political enemies or some shit to not store vital information like that.
FTFY.
If a company is (arguably) already treating security reasonably seriously, then spreading details on how to hurt their customers does not achieve anything.
That kind of assumes there aren't malicious people already exploiting the bug.
Sometimes it's better to let people know so they can defend themselves: either by closing a port, changing a configuration, turning off a service, fixing the bugs themselves and recompiling, or switching to another software system.
Bullshit. Spreading details on how to protect yourself is not the same as providing an exploit. In some cases, an exploit is trivial enough to deduce from the mitigation that there's no real way to avoid it -- in most cases, however, it's not.
End users won't be recompiling firmware in their car, and in many or most cases of security bugs, the exploit *IS* the start of widespread use.
* Step 1: Someone announces a bug
* Step 2: Vendor/discussion/patch cycle/analysis begins
* Step 3: Some asshat releases an exploit
* Step 4: Now my boxes are actually getting exploited, and they mostly weren't before. Thanks, asshat.
The point I'm trying to make is, the only reason to engage in Step 3 is to force Step 2 by hurting their customers. In which case, guess who's actually hurting their customers... You.
Most people that find vulnerabilities want to tell the manufacturer. But after a long history of being ignored or even being threatened, many have reverted to giving the corporations responsible a fixed, short time to fix things, because otherwise nothing happens. Giving time more time just makes them drag their feet, because fixing vulnerabilities costs money. Those complaining here are at the very root of the problem. I should also point out that this corporate fuck-up has been going on for a few decades now.
You're confusing the goal with the process.
More secure software is the goal.
If a temporary process of punishing a product's users by spreading details on how to hurt them is deemed necessary in order for a company to "start treating security seriously", then that's an argument one might make.
If a company is (arguably) already treating security reasonably seriously, then spreading details on how to hurt their customers does not achieve anything. It just spreads misery.
"For educational use" is as ludicrous and beside the point as "for backup purposes only" was for Hotline servers 15 years ago. If the company has or is in the process of acting reasonably fast, actually spreading the details (as opposed to threatening to spread the details) on how to hack someone just makes you a d-bag whose name will be cursed alongside that of the script kiddie who uses your info to hack someone.
And of course the objection is -- "But don't people who work 20-hour weeks get paid less?" And the point of TFA is that NO -- they still get paid a living wage. The difference in the Keynes future prediction and what we actually got is that that extra money has been siphoned off to the richest folks, rather than rewarding average workers, who might then have to work less hours to still live comfortably.
Now you're equivocating. A 20-hour/week worker lives far more comfortably now than they did in the 1930s. Hell, the average 0-hour/week worker (hey, that includes SSI/Disability) lives far more comfortably now than they did in the 1930s. You can't dissociate the societal benefits from the influx in productivity.
Where does that extra comfort come from? Well, from those Americans who *still are* working 40-hour plus workweeks. We can't all live on marginal costs.
Voice control of things in your apartment doesn't need Internet access to work. We have had voice control since the 1990s.
One of the things I'm happy Apple (and to some extent Google) has begun to offer is offline voice recognition, recognizing that not all of us want our voice recordings sent to the cloud for further processing.
I'm happy people have set up giant neural network voice recognition systems for interpreting what people are saying, using a bazillion cores in a data center, but what I really want is for the algorithm to be implemented local to my house.
And not asking if they should
Sadly, this quote basically sums up a lot of current-generation Silicon Valley thinking.
Ever seen the auxiliary corps, color guard or flag team of a marching band in the US? The flag ("silk") is ALWAYS affixed to the pole using good, old-fashioned electrical tape. (Black, white, or colored depending on show needs.)
Brand used varies by region and climate, but in California nothing beats Scotch Super 33+.
Rolls of it are in every performer's and coach's bags for use in an emergency, and if you're a roadie/techie, you'll buy a case of it for a season. Pretty funny looks at Home Depot, actually.
A better title might be "Why Hipster Coders Shouldn't Think Super-High-Level JS-Framework-of-the-Month Calls Mean You're a Good Programmer"
It's hard not to extend this to a #kidstoday rant, and I'm by no means arguing to go back to assembly, but at some point forcing large amounts of programming to the lowered-barrier of entry just reduces the percentage of folks who actually know what they're doing and can critically analyze the situation.
If only we could apply this to other works too...
I'd love it if all copies of The Communist Manifesto came pre-Fisked. It would help people from getting confused their first year in college.
As queer as Tim Cook.
Why not go back to Hypertalk and HyperCard!
Ha ha
I'm assuming you're trolling, but HyperTalk was actually pretty awesome for its intended usage. AppleScript is still a great high-level language for describing what would otherwise be completely UI-driven macro integration. Most of the really painful re-engineering of code to deal with Apple Events was done back in the 90s, and Cocoa-only writers were able to leverage that going forward. That being said, it's not a general purpose language... it's a scripting language. HyperCard had some nifty UI built-ins, but it was still a scripting language.
Use the right tool for the right job. For sysadmins, someone who wants to write everything in Shell is probably as bad as the person who doesn't want anything in Shell. (cough*systemd*cough)
Still in use. Same with horses in specialty situations.
Hell, goats (well, mules) are still used for postal delivery stateside... http://www.cbsnews.com/news/special-delivery-mail-by-mule/
I think at this point dipshit #Solutionist Millennials seem like they have developed some form of a messiah complex, in which they believe they have a moral or divine responsibility to be the agent in delivering good to the planet.
FTFY.