True. Works the other way too: we are a small company providing services to some pretty large ones and contractual discussions are certainly hairier for us than they are for them! Though having an SLA at least gives a leg to stand on if you can manage to stop them kicking it from under you. With no SLA you are on your arse from the start and have nothing but good will to prevent you from being kicked while down.
Because, exactly as he states in the message you replied to, that expensive Oracle DB comes with a useful SLA-bound support contract where-as MySQL comes with nothing of the sort.
It isn't a damning insight on Java as a language or platform, it is a damning insight how corporate minds work. I have no bout the idea was discussed off the record in several boardrooms but they were either too late, decided they could not afford to take the risk (of failing and being left with a company they didn't want for anything else and a large negative on the books from buying it), or decided the PR would swing too far the wrong way. Or perhaps had a moral objection (not every board is 100% amoral, just most of them).
Prior to Google buying motorola this was my reason for not bothering to look at Andriod phones next time I needed to change for some reason (like when the hinge on this thing dies or there is a security flaw found that can't be fixed without an upgrade I'm not permitted to apply). Apple supports their devices with updates far longer, though I'm not planning to play the Apple game for other reasons (which basically leaves Windows as my next option as blakcberry isn't gonig anywhere).
When new models get released under the now-owned-by-Google-motorola-mobile flag perhaps they will permit them to be upgraded and this will force other manufacturers to do the same to remain competative. Unless of course they only bought that for the patents and simply won't be releasing any hardware...
Most bullies are not weak and cowardly in my experience either, but they do tend to be quite canny in their choice of target. A target that will properly fight back is usually not preferred over one that won't.
Of course there are a few true psychopaths. Don't push back too hard or too often or you'll attract them by seeming to be a challenge. For the most part they tend to bully the lower bullies in the pecking order, or at least they did where I grew up. Us nerds presumably weren't enough of a high for them.
It is surprising how many of the kids that gave hassle to myself or people that I know fitted the stereotypes, and how many of them have done so in later life too. Of the ones I know about from what people back home have said, the ones that were the most bigoted have come out of the closet at some point since, and the ones that were most just-plain-thugish have amounted to nothing other than a few write-ups in the court reports in the local paper.
Bullying would be if I were to threaten to punch you in your misshapen lump of a face. I guess you're just too mentally retarded to grasp the difference between bullying and insulting.
I suppose the difference here is that I know that this is "playing" and I can't say I offend easily through words on the Internet anyway (there is a good bad joke mentioning the Special Olympics that is relevant here, you probably know it as it is an old one, but it is not the sort of line I drop into general conversation). Even if you were genuinely trying to wind me up that isn't quite the same as what he did. For a start I at least implicitly invited opinion by state my own on a general forum, and I'm not already in a mentally weakened state due to serious adverse circumstances (which the family of the girl he was a fuckwit towards would have been. He took open shots at people who ere already down. It would appear that my poofy limey tendency to jump to the defence the little guy and/or the weakened conflicts with your loud lardy yank tenancy to want to be able to mouth off anywhere at any time at any volume without negative consequences.
ps. your spelling is fine IMO (but I'm a tad dyslexic, so you might want to run it past others rather than just taking my word) though as poofter is slang you could probably get away with many other spellings ("pufta" to give the impression of a more aggressive tone and/or a harsher accent for instance). I might suggest "thick limey poofter" instead as it scans better to my mind, or "fuckwitted limey poofter" as fuckwit is one of my favourite words and I think it should get more use.
pps. I've already replied to someone else on the "this is not bullying" and "locking in a cage" bits. I'll not split the thread by copying it here. Scroll up if are in the mood to care.
Deliberately offending people is not the same as bullying people. The fact that so many these days think it is the same thing is where the problem starts with cases like this.
Mental bullying is a real problem (though one that many people grossly exaggerate, I'll agree that far). Personally I preferred the pysical bullies in my younger years, all you had to do to get rid of all of them for a while was to "accidentally" bloody the nose of one of the little cowards. The mouthy ones without the balls to come within arms reach (like this lad) would go running to teacher the moment you even coughed back in their direction.
Bullying people provides something to the bully, generally some sort of social or financial gain. Calling people names or saying something in poor taste online provides neither of these in an "anonymous" environment.
He most likely does gain. The gain is in his head of course, much as the damage he is doing to others is in theirs, but it is still not nothing. He will have felt some sort of superiority or significance beyond that which he normally feels, and if anyone "thumbs up"ed that youtube clip he would certainly have felt a degree of success and even acceptance.
That's not bullying, it's just being an arse. Punishment is fine: someone being an arse should be banned from such a website, but not incarcerated.
Banning from a single site or group of sites wouldn't work though. This sort of idiot would wear the ban as a badge of honour, and would register a new account to tell people he was doing so.
Incarceration is probably not the answer (even if just because our prisons are pretty overcrowded already, but also considering how much physical crime some people get away with without incarceration which makes this seem more disproportionate), but something significantly more than just a site ban is needed IMO but I'm not sure what would fit the bill.
People get all "its a human right" if you talk about a more general Internet ban (even a short term one) and any such ban would be pretty much completely unenforceable anyway. ASBOs are pretty much ineffective due to the "badge of honour" thing, and a curfew would have little effect (unless I'm applying the wrong stereotype and he has a particularly active social life).
That doesn't leave much. A community service order perhaps? Or maybe we could get a bit eye-for-an-eye and put up posters around his home town with his face and instructions to "insult this arse if you see him in the street, let's see how he likes it, I mean look at the podgy slack-jawed idiot".
2) Online culture is different from real-world culture. Moderation in one form or another is the norm, not the exception online. Just like open front gardens are the norm, not the exception in the real world.
Moderation has only become the norm because it has had to because of jerks. The rest of us have to make an effort to police the behaviour of jerks, or have to jump through hoops to prove we are no a jerk when we post somewhere because the somewhere is protecting itself from jerks.
Moderation being the norm is not a sign that we just need to adjust our expectations to account for jerks. Moderation being the norm is a sign that the jerks are "winning" and the problem is getting out of hand. Setting an example by giving a few of them a slap to prove their actions can have real world consequences is a step in the right direction.
What it is, is the notion of free speech combined with the notion that being an asshole shouldn't be illegal.
No. He wasn't "just being an arsehole" (we have arseholes over here, not assholes!), he was bullying. Causing pain in others either for his own gratification or just for the hell of it. Behaviour like that should be punished.
There are a lot of fine lines in this area of course, so it can be a complex debate. For instance I do not think jokes about tragic events should be punished generally but under some circumstances it ceases to be a joke that might offend some and becomes a deliberate attempt to offend. If I tell a 9/11 based gag to my friends, on my own online pages or in some other forum where "edgy" humour is fine, or a stand-up comedian known for not being a fluffy-bunny comic uses one as part of his/her set, then that is all free speech and should be protected. If I or anyone else were to have told such a joke in the middle of last weekend's anniversary markings, or on a forum for those affected by the events and subsequent fall-out, or so forth, that would be a deliberate attempt to cause offence. It would be bullying. A petty crime but a crime all the same, and should be punished.
Your telemarketer example is backwards, they are inconveniencing me not the other way around. If they don't want to deal with me, then they have the option of not disturbing my personal life or interrupting my professional time. I'm on all the do-not-call lists that are available to me, and always make sure the right boxes are ticked/unticked when I have to hand out my phone number for some reason, so there is nothing more I can do other than being a dick in the hope that I'll get a on some "troublemaker and timewaster" list that will stop them calling me (I suppose I could spend time/money getting or putting together some sort of automated screener, but I shouldn't have to do that). Even getting a new number by changing my mobile phone setup doesn't work: numbers get recycled so you get other people's junk calls and even if that were not the case there are callers who just try sequences of allocated numbers to see if they have a real phone on them. If I am constantly interrupted by random people in my home or at work, especially when I've put up a "please do not disturb" sign I feel quick justified in being a dick whether you are on the phone or stood in front of me.
Early 486SX processors were DXes from batches where some had failed the FPU tests. The power and ground connections to the FPU part were burned so that part would not function, and the rest of the chip just took this as meaning the FPU was not present (they were still separate units linked like a 386 and 387 were, they just lived on the same bit of silicon instead of in separate packages - in the Pentium class chips onwards everything was more tightly integrated so just disabling the FPU units this way would not work).
Much to the annoyance of some people 487 chips that added the FPU to a system with a 486SX were actually full-blown 486DX chips internally - when installed the 486SX unit was completely turned off (if it wasn't surface mounted, you could remove it completely). The irritation was that the 487 was often sold cheaper than a 486DX even though they were internally exactly the same part. IIRC some people found that you could cut off the extra pin a 487 had so it would function as a 486DX, if you didn't mind voiding a warranty or two.
"Automatic tracking" can almost entirely be disabled already - and for years now. You just have to DO IT, and most people would rather bitch than spend the 5 minutes it takes.
Not that easily, at least not for basic users. I can control everything on my main PC and netbook and know what needs to be controlled to sort out privacy issues I care about, but most people don't have that level of knowledge and there are many circumstances where the level of control is not present. You can't install privacy protecting add-ins or alter relevant settings on public access computers for instance, and it would be rude to play with the settings on other people's computers for your own benefit (unless you ask them, fully explain, get permission, and accept responsibility for providing tech support if something breaks because of the add-in like a site somehow detecting adblock and refusing to work while it is operating).
If someone like facebook is determined to track you then the common tips (install addins X and Y, tweak setting Z, don't have flash installed, use safe browsing mode...) won't stop them as there are some quite clever ways to maintain state even if the user has followed all the usual tips. The only sure fire way to stop facebook tracking what you do outside of facebook (running it in a separate browser running as a different user or in a VM, or if you don't have flash installed so its cookies can be shared between sessions in different browsers just a separate browser) is too much faf for most people who just want to log on and browse.
The changes are typically tightening the rules and disabling technical violations of them. That's a noble aim, but you need to save it for the next version - you can't pull that shit midstream in a "stable" series!
If your configuration file contains violations of the rules then your configuration is at fault, not the change that tightens the implementation of those rules. By using a configuration that doesn't match the rules (despite the fact the implementation lets you get away with it) you are relying on undefined behaviour and can not expect any guarantee that the behaviour won't change even in a stable branch. Defined/documented behaviours should not change in a stable branch unless there are exceptional circumstances (a security issue that can not be resolved any other sensible way for instance), but changes to undefined behaviour are fair game.
So, before upgrading anything "stable" from the Apache Foundation: Thoroughly test the result, and make sure you can back out at a minute's notice.
Before upgrading anything from anyone in a production environment you should test the result in a test environment first, unless you have a service level agreement that states the provider does that testing and will recompense you for any admin hassle and/or unplanned downtime resulting from a change breaking stuff (even then, I'd stil be inclined to test the change in a non-production copy of the production environment first, I consider that to be basic due-diligence).
None of our production servers (Linux or Windows) automatically install updates (and more manual updates do not get performed on production until tested elsewhere either, of course). Updates get installed in production once they have been given a least a basic kick-around in test environments first in an effort to make sure they don't break any assumptions made by our components/configuration or 3rd party code/config we are using. While more subtle changes could easily make it through this process (though I can't think of any that have off the top of my head), significant problems (like SSL being completely borken until the config is updated, as per your example) should be caught by the test environment so you don't have to diagnose and fix the problem after the updates have gone to live systems where issues like that could cause embarrasing downtime.
If they have been sufficiently warned about a potential problem (unsecured WiFi, malware left to roam free on a machine, and so forth), and I can tell you that the people I'm talking about have been sufficiently warned, then not quite but they are at least aiding and abbetting through deliberate neglegence.
I'm all for people being held respnosible for what their computers and connections do - then maybe people will finally start taking some responsability and be careful with online security instead of just bringing their machine to me when they get an infection that stops something working (and tell me when I point out that some of the malware has been on the machine for many months that "I know, but I never put my credit card details in or anything so it couldn't hurt me" - considering the fact they might infect other peoples's machines to be somebody else's problem), expecting me to fix it for them as a matter of urgency.
Oh I definitely remeber working with the FTP protocol. Don't worry, I have no intention of repeating that part of history.
That is how the modern world is supposed to work: we realise what problems we have, find better ways to perform those tasks affected by those problems, and move on. This process is usually referred to as "progress".
Ah, I see, I'd not thought of that. That would explain some services occasionally thinking I'm in the states, or somewhere else entirely, these days as I've started using Google's resolvers.
Though I think it is the CDN's problem not Google's (or OpenDNS's). They've relied on a property that is not guaranteed but is commonly the case (that DNS requests come from a topologically similar place as other subsequent requests), and it is now not quite as commonly the case. As a programmer I know that if you rely on an undefined behaviour you have to accept that you will get bitten if that behaviour doesn't stay the way it once was. This will affect any DNS system were a cache in one location can share data with a cache in another rather than both pulling data from the external servers separately.
So. A "good" firewall adds additional obscurity where a "cheap" firewall does not. *yawn*
No. A good firewall doesn't offer what protection it does simply by accident as a side-effect.
With regard to FTP: a good protocol doesn't needlessly require several connections that make tracking the process less trivial, and making it less efficient to boot. If you want to keep using FTP go ahead though, its no skin off my nose. Unless you are using any service I have some responsibility for of course, in which case you'll need to use a more modern protocol or take your business elsewhere.
1996 called, and they want their argument back.
Of the two arguments, I'm not convinced that the one I agree with is the backwards one.
I'm curious: what are Google doing to "fuck up the Internet by breaking all of the CDN/Geo-based services". So far as I know they are not doing anything to hide my network addresses, or the route between my machines and other hosts, from other servers. If they were poisoning routing tables or anything like to divert traffic through them and so hide the information other services use for geolocation, I'm sure there would have been a rather loud outcry of "we don't think that motto means what you think it means".
(Not asking to troll or necessarily to disagree, if there is something I'd like to know what it is - it sounds like I might have missed something interesting!)
Slashdot Mirror
42.
True. Works the other way too: we are a small company providing services to some pretty large ones and contractual discussions are certainly hairier for us than they are for them! Though having an SLA at least gives a leg to stand on if you can manage to stop them kicking it from under you. With no SLA you are on your arse from the start and have nothing but good will to prevent you from being kicked while down.
Hence the original post said "paying a 6-7 figure sum in support fees"... Was jonbryce's post really that difficult to parse?
Because, exactly as he states in the message you replied to, that expensive Oracle DB comes with a useful SLA-bound support contract where-as MySQL comes with nothing of the sort.
It isn't a damning insight on Java as a language or platform, it is a damning insight how corporate minds work. I have no bout the idea was discussed off the record in several boardrooms but they were either too late, decided they could not afford to take the risk (of failing and being left with a company they didn't want for anything else and a large negative on the books from buying it), or decided the PR would swing too far the wrong way. Or perhaps had a moral objection (not every board is 100% amoral, just most of them).
Prior to Google buying motorola this was my reason for not bothering to look at Andriod phones next time I needed to change for some reason (like when the hinge on this thing dies or there is a security flaw found that can't be fixed without an upgrade I'm not permitted to apply). Apple supports their devices with updates far longer, though I'm not planning to play the Apple game for other reasons (which basically leaves Windows as my next option as blakcberry isn't gonig anywhere).
When new models get released under the now-owned-by-Google-motorola-mobile flag perhaps they will permit them to be upgraded and this will force other manufacturers to do the same to remain competative. Unless of course they only bought that for the patents and simply won't be releasing any hardware...
Most bullies are not weak and cowardly in my experience either, but they do tend to be quite canny in their choice of target. A target that will properly fight back is usually not preferred over one that won't.
Of course there are a few true psychopaths. Don't push back too hard or too often or you'll attract them by seeming to be a challenge. For the most part they tend to bully the lower bullies in the pecking order, or at least they did where I grew up. Us nerds presumably weren't enough of a high for them.
It is surprising how many of the kids that gave hassle to myself or people that I know fitted the stereotypes, and how many of them have done so in later life too. Of the ones I know about from what people back home have said, the ones that were the most bigoted have come out of the closet at some point since, and the ones that were most just-plain-thugish have amounted to nothing other than a few write-ups in the court reports in the local paper.
I suppose the difference here is that I know that this is "playing" and I can't say I offend easily through words on the Internet anyway (there is a good bad joke mentioning the Special Olympics that is relevant here, you probably know it as it is an old one, but it is not the sort of line I drop into general conversation). Even if you were genuinely trying to wind me up that isn't quite the same as what he did. For a start I at least implicitly invited opinion by state my own on a general forum, and I'm not already in a mentally weakened state due to serious adverse circumstances (which the family of the girl he was a fuckwit towards would have been. He took open shots at people who ere already down. It would appear that my poofy limey tendency to jump to the defence the little guy and/or the weakened conflicts with your loud lardy yank tenancy to want to be able to mouth off anywhere at any time at any volume without negative consequences.
ps. your spelling is fine IMO (but I'm a tad dyslexic, so you might want to run it past others rather than just taking my word) though as poofter is slang you could probably get away with many other spellings ("pufta" to give the impression of a more aggressive tone and/or a harsher accent for instance). I might suggest "thick limey poofter" instead as it scans better to my mind, or "fuckwitted limey poofter" as fuckwit is one of my favourite words and I think it should get more use.
pps. I've already replied to someone else on the "this is not bullying" and "locking in a cage" bits. I'll not split the thread by copying it here. Scroll up if are in the mood to care.
Deliberately offending people is not the same as bullying people. The fact that so many these days think it is the same thing is where the problem starts with cases like this.
Mental bullying is a real problem (though one that many people grossly exaggerate, I'll agree that far). Personally I preferred the pysical bullies in my younger years, all you had to do to get rid of all of them for a while was to "accidentally" bloody the nose of one of the little cowards. The mouthy ones without the balls to come within arms reach (like this lad) would go running to teacher the moment you even coughed back in their direction.
Bullying people provides something to the bully, generally some sort of social or financial gain. Calling people names or saying something in poor taste online provides neither of these in an "anonymous" environment.
He most likely does gain. The gain is in his head of course, much as the damage he is doing to others is in theirs, but it is still not nothing. He will have felt some sort of superiority or significance beyond that which he normally feels, and if anyone "thumbs up"ed that youtube clip he would certainly have felt a degree of success and even acceptance.
That's not bullying, it's just being an arse. Punishment is fine: someone being an arse should be banned from such a website, but not incarcerated.
Banning from a single site or group of sites wouldn't work though. This sort of idiot would wear the ban as a badge of honour, and would register a new account to tell people he was doing so.
Incarceration is probably not the answer (even if just because our prisons are pretty overcrowded already, but also considering how much physical crime some people get away with without incarceration which makes this seem more disproportionate), but something significantly more than just a site ban is needed IMO but I'm not sure what would fit the bill.
People get all "its a human right" if you talk about a more general Internet ban (even a short term one) and any such ban would be pretty much completely unenforceable anyway. ASBOs are pretty much ineffective due to the "badge of honour" thing, and a curfew would have little effect (unless I'm applying the wrong stereotype and he has a particularly active social life).
That doesn't leave much. A community service order perhaps? Or maybe we could get a bit eye-for-an-eye and put up posters around his home town with his face and instructions to "insult this arse if you see him in the street, let's see how he likes it, I mean look at the podgy slack-jawed idiot".
2) Online culture is different from real-world culture. Moderation in one form or another is the norm, not the exception online. Just like open front gardens are the norm, not the exception in the real world.
Moderation has only become the norm because it has had to because of jerks. The rest of us have to make an effort to police the behaviour of jerks, or have to jump through hoops to prove we are no a jerk when we post somewhere because the somewhere is protecting itself from jerks.
Moderation being the norm is not a sign that we just need to adjust our expectations to account for jerks. Moderation being the norm is a sign that the jerks are "winning" and the problem is getting out of hand. Setting an example by giving a few of them a slap to prove their actions can have real world consequences is a step in the right direction.
No. He wasn't "just being an arsehole" (we have arseholes over here, not assholes!), he was bullying. Causing pain in others either for his own gratification or just for the hell of it. Behaviour like that should be punished.
There are a lot of fine lines in this area of course, so it can be a complex debate. For instance I do not think jokes about tragic events should be punished generally but under some circumstances it ceases to be a joke that might offend some and becomes a deliberate attempt to offend. If I tell a 9/11 based gag to my friends, on my own online pages or in some other forum where "edgy" humour is fine, or a stand-up comedian known for not being a fluffy-bunny comic uses one as part of his/her set, then that is all free speech and should be protected. If I or anyone else were to have told such a joke in the middle of last weekend's anniversary markings, or on a forum for those affected by the events and subsequent fall-out, or so forth, that would be a deliberate attempt to cause offence. It would be bullying. A petty crime but a crime all the same, and should be punished.
Your telemarketer example is backwards, they are inconveniencing me not the other way around. If they don't want to deal with me, then they have the option of not disturbing my personal life or interrupting my professional time. I'm on all the do-not-call lists that are available to me, and always make sure the right boxes are ticked/unticked when I have to hand out my phone number for some reason, so there is nothing more I can do other than being a dick in the hope that I'll get a on some "troublemaker and timewaster" list that will stop them calling me (I suppose I could spend time/money getting or putting together some sort of automated screener, but I shouldn't have to do that). Even getting a new number by changing my mobile phone setup doesn't work: numbers get recycled so you get other people's junk calls and even if that were not the case there are callers who just try sequences of allocated numbers to see if they have a real phone on them. If I am constantly interrupted by random people in my home or at work, especially when I've put up a "please do not disturb" sign I feel quick justified in being a dick whether you are on the phone or stood in front of me.
Early 486SX processors were DXes from batches where some had failed the FPU tests. The power and ground connections to the FPU part were burned so that part would not function, and the rest of the chip just took this as meaning the FPU was not present (they were still separate units linked like a 386 and 387 were, they just lived on the same bit of silicon instead of in separate packages - in the Pentium class chips onwards everything was more tightly integrated so just disabling the FPU units this way would not work).
Much to the annoyance of some people 487 chips that added the FPU to a system with a 486SX were actually full-blown 486DX chips internally - when installed the 486SX unit was completely turned off (if it wasn't surface mounted, you could remove it completely). The irritation was that the 487 was often sold cheaper than a 486DX even though they were internally exactly the same part. IIRC some people found that you could cut off the extra pin a 487 had so it would function as a 486DX, if you didn't mind voiding a warranty or two.
Not that easily, at least not for basic users. I can control everything on my main PC and netbook and know what needs to be controlled to sort out privacy issues I care about, but most people don't have that level of knowledge and there are many circumstances where the level of control is not present. You can't install privacy protecting add-ins or alter relevant settings on public access computers for instance, and it would be rude to play with the settings on other people's computers for your own benefit (unless you ask them, fully explain, get permission, and accept responsibility for providing tech support if something breaks because of the add-in like a site somehow detecting adblock and refusing to work while it is operating).
If someone like facebook is determined to track you then the common tips (install addins X and Y, tweak setting Z, don't have flash installed, use safe browsing mode...) won't stop them as there are some quite clever ways to maintain state even if the user has followed all the usual tips. The only sure fire way to stop facebook tracking what you do outside of facebook (running it in a separate browser running as a different user or in a VM, or if you don't have flash installed so its cookies can be shared between sessions in different browsers just a separate browser) is too much faf for most people who just want to log on and browse.
The changes are typically tightening the rules and disabling technical violations of them. That's a noble aim, but you need to save it for the next version - you can't pull that shit midstream in a "stable" series!
If your configuration file contains violations of the rules then your configuration is at fault, not the change that tightens the implementation of those rules. By using a configuration that doesn't match the rules (despite the fact the implementation lets you get away with it) you are relying on undefined behaviour and can not expect any guarantee that the behaviour won't change even in a stable branch. Defined/documented behaviours should not change in a stable branch unless there are exceptional circumstances (a security issue that can not be resolved any other sensible way for instance), but changes to undefined behaviour are fair game.
So, before upgrading anything "stable" from the Apache Foundation: Thoroughly test the result, and make sure you can back out at a minute's notice.
Before upgrading anything from anyone in a production environment you should test the result in a test environment first, unless you have a service level agreement that states the provider does that testing and will recompense you for any admin hassle and/or unplanned downtime resulting from a change breaking stuff (even then, I'd stil be inclined to test the change in a non-production copy of the production environment first, I consider that to be basic due-diligence).
None of our production servers (Linux or Windows) automatically install updates (and more manual updates do not get performed on production until tested elsewhere either, of course). Updates get installed in production once they have been given a least a basic kick-around in test environments first in an effort to make sure they don't break any assumptions made by our components/configuration or 3rd party code/config we are using. While more subtle changes could easily make it through this process (though I can't think of any that have off the top of my head), significant problems (like SSL being completely borken until the config is updated, as per your example) should be caught by the test environment so you don't have to diagnose and fix the problem after the updates have gone to live systems where issues like that could cause embarrasing downtime.
Any chance of a link to where such hardware can be picked up for that sort of price?
Thats all fine. But not easy if the real criminals can easily gain anonymity and untracability due to the inaction of fools.
If they have been sufficiently warned about a potential problem (unsecured WiFi, malware left to roam free on a machine, and so forth), and I can tell you that the people I'm talking about have been sufficiently warned, then not quite but they are at least aiding and abbetting through deliberate neglegence.
I'm all for people being held respnosible for what their computers and connections do - then maybe people will finally start taking some responsability and be careful with online security instead of just bringing their machine to me when they get an infection that stops something working (and tell me when I point out that some of the malware has been on the machine for many months that "I know, but I never put my credit card details in or anything so it couldn't hurt me" - considering the fact they might infect other peoples's machines to be somebody else's problem), expecting me to fix it for them as a matter of urgency.
Oh I definitely remeber working with the FTP protocol. Don't worry, I have no intention of repeating that part of history.
That is how the modern world is supposed to work: we realise what problems we have, find better ways to perform those tasks affected by those problems, and move on. This process is usually referred to as "progress".
I currently live in 2011. 1988's stance on file transfer protocols is not something I feel the need to consider relevant.
Ah, I see, I'd not thought of that. That would explain some services occasionally thinking I'm in the states, or somewhere else entirely, these days as I've started using Google's resolvers.
Though I think it is the CDN's problem not Google's (or OpenDNS's). They've relied on a property that is not guaranteed but is commonly the case (that DNS requests come from a topologically similar place as other subsequent requests), and it is now not quite as commonly the case. As a programmer I know that if you rely on an undefined behaviour you have to accept that you will get bitten if that behaviour doesn't stay the way it once was. This will affect any DNS system were a cache in one location can share data with a cache in another rather than both pulling data from the external servers separately.
I'll admit I've not read the fine article. But the discussion here implied it was being touted as a new and interesting feature.
So. A "good" firewall adds additional obscurity where a "cheap" firewall does not.
*yawn*
No. A good firewall doesn't offer what protection it does simply by accident as a side-effect.
With regard to FTP: a good protocol doesn't needlessly require several connections that make tracking the process less trivial, and making it less efficient to boot. If you want to keep using FTP go ahead though, its no skin off my nose. Unless you are using any service I have some responsibility for of course, in which case you'll need to use a more modern protocol or take your business elsewhere.
1996 called, and they want their argument back.
Of the two arguments, I'm not convinced that the one I agree with is the backwards one.
I'm curious: what are Google doing to "fuck up the Internet by breaking all of the CDN/Geo-based services". So far as I know they are not doing anything to hide my network addresses, or the route between my machines and other hosts, from other servers. If they were poisoning routing tables or anything like to divert traffic through them and so hide the information other services use for geolocation, I'm sure there would have been a rather loud outcry of "we don't think that motto means what you think it means".
(Not asking to troll or necessarily to disagree, if there is something I'd like to know what it is - it sounds like I might have missed something interesting!)