Interesting. That was one of the assertions that I made that was derided.
I agree with you that it's true. It's just not the only reason not to trust them. OTOH, if there are some that always fail into "read only" mode, they aren't as bad as I've been thinking.
I'm sure there are limits as to how much storage is desirable. But I'm not sure what those are. For me a couple of 350GB disks and a few 2TB usb backup drives has sufficed for a few years, and there's no immediate sign that I'll run over. OTOH, I'm working on a program that may well eat it all up and beg for more.
Last time I said that someone replied "O, you're using consumer grade", which was true, as that's all I have access to. And it didn't cause me to trust SSDs any more than I had.
A bit later someone else, in another thread, said that he was still having problems with enterprise grade SSDs.
I'm not sure whether the problem is that the technology is unreliable or that the manufacturers don't care, but I see no reason to trust SSDs for anything archival, or for any application where the power might suddenly fail. You don't just lose the data in transit, you lose everything on the media. (The last time I got a failure, admittedly, the media just turned read-only, which is acceptable.)
Check mushrooms growing out of cow flops in cool, damp weather. That's where they grow, but I don't know how to tell one kind of mushroom from another, so consult an expert. You don't want to get a death angel by mistake. (Well, honestly I don't even know where the death angels grow, but there are several varieties of mushroom that will make you sick if not kill you.)
It's not at all clear that "there is *FAR* more about the universe that we don't know than what we don't know". That *might* be true, but it's not really the way to bet unless you are counting all the small details.
OTOH, the small details can have a significant effect on how well the implementation works, so it's not really unfair to count them, it's just very different than the major rules. But if that's what you mean, you shouldn't mix them with things like Newton's law of universal gravitation. You should make a clear distinction.
That said, we clearly *are* missing a few of the basic laws, and it's possible that we're missing most of them. It's also possible that we've so misunderstood the ones we have that they'll need to be completely reformulated. But that's not the way to bet. Unless you can get really long odds.
From my "all I know is what I (happen to) read in the papers" point of view this "attack" could be anything from allergies affecting their nerves to a subtle poison attack to them wearing ear buds that operated on a frequency that was locally used for industrial control. But if the US govt. thought it was a secret weapon, wouldn't they try to discover what it was and how it worked before removing their source of information?
Are there? I haven't heard any. Of course, it's also true that I haven't been looking, but I'd think that if there were at least one plausible theory it would have been blasted all over the news media.
The closest I come is that they might have directed the air flights to the Havana airport low over the consulate...but that didn't fit the described effects, which were supposed to be focused.
Actually, the cause that I've heard that best fits the described effects is the "Apple earbuds" theory that someone came up with above. That's a bit silly, but if they *were* using Apple earbuds they could be periodically blasted with loud sounds through interfering radio signals. Which might be on a band quite legal locally and used for some irregularly occurring purpose.
OTOH, I didn't go to youtube to listen to the purported sounds, either. So I'm just operating on news stories that I happened across.
One comment, though: If the US really believed that it *was* some secret weapon, wouldn't it try to find out what it was before shutting down the source of information?
Additionally, this won't be acceptable unless the stone can be sold at a profit. That doesn't look feasible without lots of government subsidies on a permanent basis (possibly as carbon offsets, but some kind of subsidy).
I think the oceanic algae farms are much more plausible. This story counts more as "interesting". And note that it depends on a local source of excess energy. (Geothermal in Iceland, but nuclear could also work. So could wind or solar. But it seems more of a dump for excess energy than something that would be practical on a large scale, even if the result could be sold for more than the cost of hauling it away....and the stone they described didn't sound very strong, so you probably couldn't.)
There's also the question of how much CO2 would be produced in the process of getting the materials used as a base to the plant. It's not like they're converting CO2 into diamonds, they're mixing it with something...and often that something is made by removing CO2 from a naturally occurring compound, They aren't starting with something simple like gypsum, though, so the process chain would need to be evaluated.
Off hand, what this is is some scientists in a lab discovered some process, and then someone at the lab looked for a way to write it up as something newsworthy.
Engineers tend to make different kinds of mistake than do accountants. With engineers running the company this particular kind of mistake probably wouldn't have happened. Actually, with accountants running the company it wouldn't have either. Accountants would have paid attention when the Wall street investors were told that it was a bad investment because the staff wasn't properly trained and they had no backup plan to deal with a break in. Apparently the people running the company were confidence men, and were gambling that they could take the money and get away with it.
No, the main reason that Linux is more secure is that MS stripped out all the security from the OS that they emulated in order to make it run faster on a smaller, cheaper, machine.
MSWindows as designed for a single user machine operated without any network connections. Linux was designed from the start as a multi-user OS with network connections. So security has had to be retrofitted into MSWindows.
I understand that they've done a pretty good job, but because of their EULA I'll never really know.
If they they can't afford to protect the data then they have no business collecting it. They don't deserve to exist as a business.
If they can't afford to ensure the accuracy of the data, then they should be responsible for all damages caused by it being inaccurate. And considering how difficult it is to ensure that the data about anyone is accurate, or even to know that you're being damaged, the damages should be multiplied by a few thousand. After all, they're the ones making it difficult to ensure that the data is accurate, or even to know that you need to check on whether it's accurate.
The OS only matters if you can't do the work at the application level. Java could have been involved, but only because jvms are so common. Otherwise it would have needed to be some non-virtual machine language, like C or some such.
The thing is, if you can compromise a web application sufficiently to allow you to download and execute a binary, and you have your data available at the account that's contacting the web, no further security breaches are needed to have EVERYTHING copied over. Or erased. Or selectively altered. The bastards who encrypt all your data aren't doing the worst thing that they could, merely the one they find most profitable. (I wonder how often they send an actual decryption key after payment...and how often the acceptance of payment is the last you hear of them.)
It wouldn't even need to infringe copyright...at least not in any detectable way. If you morph 3 images of people together properly the resultant figure is still apparently human, and often even a bit more aesthetic, because more symmetrical, but not recognizably any one of the original sources. You can't copyright a plot, because all plots that people can enjoy existed long before copyright laws. Etc.
The thing is, this is a very small wedge of human activity, which is rather limited in it's variety, so not much originality is either possible or desired. In a way it's like cake recipes... you can have a limited amount of variation, and you can alter some proportions a bit, but change it too much and you get something that doesn't work...or at least is something that can't really be called a cake. So if you start off with a very large collection of all the traditionally working recipes, you can create ad hoc variations within those boundaries that are at least minimally successful. (I did once come up with a frosting whose color rendered the cake inedible unless you closed your eyes before seeing it...but that's a rare exception.)
Once they've got that database recorded and classified, the next step is clearly to create composites, i.e. "original" performances.
Please note this doesn't even take a real AI. Not even a narrow AI. The AI is needed to classify the images, but they've already separated recognition of the particular actions from the individuals involved. Now they can mix the thematic elements in multiple different combinations, and let the audiences decide which compositions are most successful.
I don't know whether it's more dangerous than human drivers or not. The news coverage is extremely biased, and doesn't provide much way to judge. I'm certainly not going to take the word of a manager at GM when talking about his competition.
It would really be nice if this could be done on a county by county basis, so that people could make decisions based on real evidence rather than gut feelings.
I'd actually rate California drivers about average, though it varies a lot from place to place. They are certainly better than the drivers I remember from Japan about 40 years ago. But they aren't as courteous as the drivers I remember from Madera, CA about 45 years ago.
My guess is that the denser the traffic, the less courteous the drivers are...with idiotic exceptions. For example, while I was living in Madera I was waiting for the school bus in a fog so dense you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. After a couple of hours we (my sister and I) got notice that the bus wasn't coming because two pickup trucks had rear ended it (and each other) at about 60 MPH. Both pickup truck drivers were quite thoroughly dead, and the bus needed extensive repairs. In a fog you couldn't see through. The bus was stopped at a stop sign to pick up someone. Still, the average driver was more courteous.
If you want to claim that it's proof that Russia interfered with the US elections, you've got a point. If you want to claim it's proof that Facebook acted above the law and isn't being punished, you've got a point. If you want to claim that Facebook are unpatriotic villians, you've got a point.
If you want to claim it as proof of something else, you need to connect the dots. There's no obvious connection to Kapersky. (I speculate about connections, but different ones than you appear to be suggesting...though I can't really tell, as your insinuations are too unfocused. And not based on Facebook, but rather on the fact that a Russian company is subject to the Russian government.)
Based on various different news reports, I'd say that she was a very bad CEO, but not a truly terrible one. Yahoo was dying, and nobody was going to save it, so she ended up with the job of killing it in the most profitable manner. She killed it in a profitable manner. She hurt more people than she needed to in the process, and she was greedy, but nobody was going to do a job like that for idealistic reasons.
The thing is, the "political parties" are private organizations. They are under no obligation at all to respect the voters choices. I believe they could have just appointed their selected candidate without ever going to a vote. The purpose of the primary system isn't to select the candidate, it's to drum up support for the candidate. It is *presumed* that they'll want the candidate that can get the most support, but there have been several instances in both parties that show this presumption to be false.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. That was one of the assertions that I made that was derided.
I agree with you that it's true. It's just not the only reason not to trust them. OTOH, if there are some that always fail into "read only" mode, they aren't as bad as I've been thinking.
I'm sure there are limits as to how much storage is desirable. But I'm not sure what those are. For me a couple of 350GB disks and a few 2TB usb backup drives has sufficed for a few years, and there's no immediate sign that I'll run over. OTOH, I'm working on a program that may well eat it all up and beg for more.
Last time I said that someone replied "O, you're using consumer grade", which was true, as that's all I have access to. And it didn't cause me to trust SSDs any more than I had.
A bit later someone else, in another thread, said that he was still having problems with enterprise grade SSDs.
I'm not sure whether the problem is that the technology is unreliable or that the manufacturers don't care, but I see no reason to trust SSDs for anything archival, or for any application where the power might suddenly fail. You don't just lose the data in transit, you lose everything on the media. (The last time I got a failure, admittedly, the media just turned read-only, which is acceptable.)
Check mushrooms growing out of cow flops in cool, damp weather. That's where they grow, but I don't know how to tell one kind of mushroom from another, so consult an expert. You don't want to get a death angel by mistake. (Well, honestly I don't even know where the death angels grow, but there are several varieties of mushroom that will make you sick if not kill you.)
If this is true, the parent post should not only be modded up, but even added into the summary.
It's not at all clear that "there is *FAR* more about the universe that we don't know than what we don't know". That *might* be true, but it's not really the way to bet unless you are counting all the small details.
OTOH, the small details can have a significant effect on how well the implementation works, so it's not really unfair to count them, it's just very different than the major rules. But if that's what you mean, you shouldn't mix them with things like Newton's law of universal gravitation. You should make a clear distinction.
That said, we clearly *are* missing a few of the basic laws, and it's possible that we're missing most of them. It's also possible that we've so misunderstood the ones we have that they'll need to be completely reformulated. But that's not the way to bet. Unless you can get really long odds.
From my "all I know is what I (happen to) read in the papers" point of view this "attack" could be anything from allergies affecting their nerves to a subtle poison attack to them wearing ear buds that operated on a frequency that was locally used for industrial control. But if the US govt. thought it was a secret weapon, wouldn't they try to discover what it was and how it worked before removing their source of information?
Are there? I haven't heard any. Of course, it's also true that I haven't been looking, but I'd think that if there were at least one plausible theory it would have been blasted all over the news media.
The closest I come is that they might have directed the air flights to the Havana airport low over the consulate...but that didn't fit the described effects, which were supposed to be focused.
Actually, the cause that I've heard that best fits the described effects is the "Apple earbuds" theory that someone came up with above. That's a bit silly, but if they *were* using Apple earbuds they could be periodically blasted with loud sounds through interfering radio signals. Which might be on a band quite legal locally and used for some irregularly occurring purpose.
OTOH, I didn't go to youtube to listen to the purported sounds, either. So I'm just operating on news stories that I happened across.
One comment, though: If the US really believed that it *was* some secret weapon, wouldn't it try to find out what it was before shutting down the source of information?
That sounds more like lab scale than pilot plant.
Additionally, this won't be acceptable unless the stone can be sold at a profit. That doesn't look feasible without lots of government subsidies on a permanent basis (possibly as carbon offsets, but some kind of subsidy).
I think the oceanic algae farms are much more plausible. This story counts more as "interesting". And note that it depends on a local source of excess energy. (Geothermal in Iceland, but nuclear could also work. So could wind or solar. But it seems more of a dump for excess energy than something that would be practical on a large scale, even if the result could be sold for more than the cost of hauling it away....and the stone they described didn't sound very strong, so you probably couldn't.)
There's also the question of how much CO2 would be produced in the process of getting the materials used as a base to the plant. It's not like they're converting CO2 into diamonds, they're mixing it with something...and often that something is made by removing CO2 from a naturally occurring compound, They aren't starting with something simple like gypsum, though, so the process chain would need to be evaluated.
Off hand, what this is is some scientists in a lab discovered some process, and then someone at the lab looked for a way to write it up as something newsworthy.
Engineers tend to make different kinds of mistake than do accountants. With engineers running the company this particular kind of mistake probably wouldn't have happened. Actually, with accountants running the company it wouldn't have either. Accountants would have paid attention when the Wall street investors were told that it was a bad investment because the staff wasn't properly trained and they had no backup plan to deal with a break in. Apparently the people running the company were confidence men, and were gambling that they could take the money and get away with it.
No, the main reason that Linux is more secure is that MS stripped out all the security from the OS that they emulated in order to make it run faster on a smaller, cheaper, machine.
MSWindows as designed for a single user machine operated without any network connections. Linux was designed from the start as a multi-user OS with network connections. So security has had to be retrofitted into MSWindows.
I understand that they've done a pretty good job, but because of their EULA I'll never really know.
If they they can't afford to protect the data then they have no business collecting it. They don't deserve to exist as a business.
If they can't afford to ensure the accuracy of the data, then they should be responsible for all damages caused by it being inaccurate. And considering how difficult it is to ensure that the data about anyone is accurate, or even to know that you're being damaged, the damages should be multiplied by a few thousand. After all, they're the ones making it difficult to ensure that the data is accurate, or even to know that you need to check on whether it's accurate.
The thing is, it wouldn't affect Equifax much if the data *WAS* modified. They don't care much whether it's accurate or not.
Well, all the C-level managers and the BoD, yes.
I think it's called HTML5.
The OS only matters if you can't do the work at the application level. Java could have been involved, but only because jvms are so common. Otherwise it would have needed to be some non-virtual machine language, like C or some such.
The thing is, if you can compromise a web application sufficiently to allow you to download and execute a binary, and you have your data available at the account that's contacting the web, no further security breaches are needed to have EVERYTHING copied over. Or erased. Or selectively altered. The bastards who encrypt all your data aren't doing the worst thing that they could, merely the one they find most profitable. (I wonder how often they send an actual decryption key after payment...and how often the acceptance of payment is the last you hear of them.)
It wouldn't even need to infringe copyright...at least not in any detectable way. If you morph 3 images of people together properly the resultant figure is still apparently human, and often even a bit more aesthetic, because more symmetrical, but not recognizably any one of the original sources. You can't copyright a plot, because all plots that people can enjoy existed long before copyright laws. Etc.
The thing is, this is a very small wedge of human activity, which is rather limited in it's variety, so not much originality is either possible or desired. In a way it's like cake recipes... you can have a limited amount of variation, and you can alter some proportions a bit, but change it too much and you get something that doesn't work...or at least is something that can't really be called a cake. So if you start off with a very large collection of all the traditionally working recipes, you can create ad hoc variations within those boundaries that are at least minimally successful. (I did once come up with a frosting whose color rendered the cake inedible unless you closed your eyes before seeing it...but that's a rare exception.)
Once they've got that database recorded and classified, the next step is clearly to create composites, i.e. "original" performances.
Please note this doesn't even take a real AI. Not even a narrow AI. The AI is needed to classify the images, but they've already separated recognition of the particular actions from the individuals involved. Now they can mix the thematic elements in multiple different combinations, and let the audiences decide which compositions are most successful.
Ok. Just be aware that those cars will have camera footage of your actions...
You make find the case a bit difficult to make.
I don't know whether it's more dangerous than human drivers or not. The news coverage is extremely biased, and doesn't provide much way to judge. I'm certainly not going to take the word of a manager at GM when talking about his competition.
It would really be nice if this could be done on a county by county basis, so that people could make decisions based on real evidence rather than gut feelings.
I don't know ... the new update wouldn't have any track record.
I'd actually rate California drivers about average, though it varies a lot from place to place. They are certainly better than the drivers I remember from Japan about 40 years ago. But they aren't as courteous as the drivers I remember from Madera, CA about 45 years ago.
My guess is that the denser the traffic, the less courteous the drivers are...with idiotic exceptions. For example, while I was living in Madera I was waiting for the school bus in a fog so dense you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. After a couple of hours we (my sister and I) got notice that the bus wasn't coming because two pickup trucks had rear ended it (and each other) at about 60 MPH. Both pickup truck drivers were quite thoroughly dead, and the bus needed extensive repairs. In a fog you couldn't see through. The bus was stopped at a stop sign to pick up someone. Still, the average driver was more courteous.
Proof of what?
If you want to claim that it's proof that Russia interfered with the US elections, you've got a point. If you want to claim it's proof that Facebook acted above the law and isn't being punished, you've got a point. If you want to claim that Facebook are unpatriotic villians, you've got a point.
If you want to claim it as proof of something else, you need to connect the dots. There's no obvious connection to Kapersky. (I speculate about connections, but different ones than you appear to be suggesting...though I can't really tell, as your insinuations are too unfocused. And not based on Facebook, but rather on the fact that a Russian company is subject to the Russian government.)
She hurt a lot more people than she had to, and she was greedy. So yes, she was a bad CEO.
Based on various different news reports, I'd say that she was a very bad CEO, but not a truly terrible one. Yahoo was dying, and nobody was going to save it, so she ended up with the job of killing it in the most profitable manner. She killed it in a profitable manner. She hurt more people than she needed to in the process, and she was greedy, but nobody was going to do a job like that for idealistic reasons.
The thing is, the "political parties" are private organizations. They are under no obligation at all to respect the voters choices. I believe they could have just appointed their selected candidate without ever going to a vote. The purpose of the primary system isn't to select the candidate, it's to drum up support for the candidate. It is *presumed* that they'll want the candidate that can get the most support, but there have been several instances in both parties that show this presumption to be false.