if they believe hard enough, a dream big enough, that everything will happen - because after all: technological progress is inevitable. It will never end!
I"m not a 'space nutter'; I'm not even very interested in space exploration. But I have to say that your description, (which you have sarcastically and pejoratively attributed to the space nutters), is in fact a pretty accurate description of much of the past century. When you look at Science Fiction's history of predicting and/or inspiring the kind of technological progress that seems magical by the standards of even a few decades ago, that 'dream big enough and everything will happen' mindset doesn't seem so naive and juvenile as you make it out to be.
I rooted my last HTC, (a Desire 510), but it was kind of a 'partial root'. It gave me root access, and I could do things like manipulate system files and run a firewall that requires root. But I couldn't delete crapps like Facebook, Twitter; or rather, I could, but they'd magically reappear after the next hard boot. I tried changing file permissions, and even set immutable, but a hard boot over-rode the perms and restored the original files. I needed to get the phone into "S-OFF" mode, but apparently that wasn't possible with that model. So I never really had full root priveleges.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Google's new HTC phones either couldn't be fully rooted, or couldn't be rooted at all - especially with Google's attitude getting worse and worse. I really wish Firefox and/or Ubuntu had managed to become viable alternatives to Android.
Those "smart" TV's and "smart" media players have menus/interfaces that can kiss my ass.
If they could kiss your ass, then they could also kiss other things, and the profit margins on smart TV's would be much, MUCH higher than they currently are...
The next great wave of delivered workplace wisdom to be spouted by vastly overpaid flavour-of-the-month management consultants: make all employees, without exception, hand in their cellphones as they arrive in the morning. Of course, the 'important people' in the company will be exempt.
If I fly at 1500ft over your property, I'm not entering your property. In fact, the FARs allow for me to get to 500ft over your property. Below that I'm violating minimum altitude rules. Any craft that flies on its own power is an aircraft, remotely piloted or not. And the FAA governs all of that, not the individual states. A state cannot legally prohibit me from flying anywhere, only the FAA can.
So does that mean if I have a hovercraft with a fan powerful enough that I don't have to have the skirt touching the ground, I'm under FAA regs? And I can hover a few inches over anyone's property without being a trespasser in the eyes of the law?
I mention this just to point out that the existing laws seem to be, ummm... 'incomplete', even with regard to pre-drone technology; so they sure as hell aren't up to snuff when it comes to camera-laden RC craft. A whole new set of laws needs to be developed, preferably at the federal level. Otherwise a gust of wind blowing a craft over state lines might get the operator in hot water. Then there's the jurisdictional issue; which state's laws would apply, the one the operator is standing in, or the one the drone is flying over?
Well if that's true it's one of the most spectacularly boneheaded decisions I've ever heard of. People rely on mapping programs for important stuff.
People who rely on mapping programs for "important stuff" might want to use a service they pay for with money, instead of one that they pay for with their personal data and the availability of their eyeballs. The former tends to come with either explicit or legally assumed obligations on the part of the provider, while the latter has terms and conditions that hold the provider harmless and put the user at a legal disadvantage. Besides, if it's really important, then it's incumbent upon the user to check more than one source.
Many on the left love protectionism...except when they don't.
Many on the right hate protectionism...except when they don't.
Corporations just love having unfettered access to other markets for their products. They also love unrestricted access to supplies of (cheaper) materials and labour in other countries; but let their customers demand the same, and all of a sudden the hypocritical bastards lobby for protectionism, and start spreading FUD about the supposed dangers of products from other countries. Their idea of a 'free market' is really a 'captive market' - one that is kept captive by the legislation they buy, the lies they spread, and the dirty deals they strike with their counterparts in other countries.
Yes, I know that what we now call 'social engineering' has been around for as long as humans existed, and probably longer. But when I say "new tech frontier", I mean the marriage of the scientific method, technological processes, and technologically-gathered data, with more scientifically-rigorous studies and experiments in sociology, psychology, neurology, and biology.
Criminals are now systematically, and probably even experimentally, exploiting employees' psychological and social traits in combination with various technical vulnerabilities. The companies being attacked will feel they have no choice but to respond with their own research and experiments in the area of vetting, monitoring, influencing, and outright brainwashing their employees, (not to mention both prescribing and proscribing certain actions and behaviours), on a 24/7 basis. There will be a lot of science applied to this kind of problem; we're seeing some of it already with things like the Predictive Policing program in Chicago.
George Orwell's work has often been mentioned here on Slashdot, and 1984 was in many ways an eerily prescient work. But if current trends such as those I've outlined above play out as I imagine, we may end up with a less metaphorical, more literal version of Orwell's dystopia.
If anyone at Google gets arrested for linking to infringing content, it will be the end of the Internet as we know it.
If anyone at Google gets arrested for linking to infringing content, it will be the beginning of civilization as we used to know it. You know, that short, golden age when corporate overlords were at least occasionally arrested and jailed for breaking the law, when the average citizen had at least a small say in the policies enacted by their elected representatives, and when corporations actually cared about what their customers thought because those customers were still capable of hurting them financially.
Arrests at Google would be a possible sign of the turning of the tide; hope that 'government by the people, for the people' would stop being an empty, embarrassing slogan; perhaps a harbinger of the playing field at last being levelled, where there would be no distinction before the law between Artem Vaulin and Sergey Brin. Yeah, I know it will never happen, but it's nice to dream sometimes.
BTW, it seems pretty likely that if Vaulin and company had managed to become sufficiently rich and well-connected before the heat was turned up on KAT, they'd be enjoying the kind of immunity and spurious respect that Page and Brin now take for granted. And PS, the Internet might be a more interesting, more vibrant, fairer place if the Googletards and slagvertisers and marketing wankers had left it the fuck alone.
The majority of my friends aren't geeks. What really weirds me out is that they say they wouldn't tell their friends everything about their private lives, but if I tell them that IT admins with access to their entire online life are just people like me, their eyes glaze over.
I try to explain it in simple terms: You don't want me to know this private stuff about you - but in my professional capacity I have access to all this information about you. There are numerous examples of governments with political agendas or individuals with personal agendas abusing access to private information. You are relying on the fact that you will never knowingly or unknowingly get on the wrong side of anybody in that position.
But still, blank.
I have the same problem. I think it has something to do with 'out of sight, out of mind'. If our friends don't know, will likely never meet, and don't know about the people who have access to their private data, then it's easy for them to keep their heads in the sand. It's comfortable, it requires no additional effort, and the threat of having to change their daily routines and upset their social structures feels more imminent and more dangerous than the (in their minds still abstract) threat of having their private info revealed to the world. I think this is partly just a human trait, and partly the result of indoctrination in public schools in an industrial society.
I don't know how to explain it to people. I mean when I was a kid life was simpler, as actions were less likely to have consequences: I'd just go into l33t hax0r mode and obtain files from their machine / school computer account and then show them what I can do...
I just don't know what to do.
I've never been remotely close to being a hacker, never mind 'l33t'. But I also don't know what to do. I offer my friends help with making their online activities safer and more private, and all I hear are crickets. And I'm not talking about ditching Facebook, Twitter, and the like - I'm just talking about ad blockers, NoScript, and a basic education about the types of places and behaviours to avoid. If they won't even do the Internet equivalent of asking a partner about STD's before having sex, how the hell would they ever come to terms with the fact that companies like Facebook are just using them and plundering their very lives for profit? Sometimes I feel like Neo in The Matrix.
...People need to start boycotting companies that do this kind of thing.
The vast majority of people don't care and don't want to know. They've been trained from birth to not be analytical and to follow the herd. For those in power, making "the people" feel powerless is good; making them feel that everything is OK and that they have neither need nor desire for power, is even better.
Also time to bring back anti-trust laws and break up any companies that are "too big to fail".
To a large extent, laws are effectively written and enforced by the companies that are "too big to fail" and their friends. Unless and until corporate hegemony is upended or destroyed this kind of abuse will continue to grow.
Let Asians build the world's fastest trains and the continent-wide energy systems we can only dream about. We have lawsuit AI technology we can use to rob each other blind as we cash those unemployment checks.
Some of those Asians will undoubtedly invest in American lawsuits in order to help fund those trains and energy systems, with the added bonus that they're also helping the competition bankrupt itself.
When your legal system becomes the realm of financial investment trading you KNOW your system is broken.
When your political system becomes the realm of financial investment trading you KNOW the legal system isn't far behind and your society is well and truly fucked.
It's a lot harder to defend the integrity of the system when supposedly impartial actors have quantifiable effects.
With that in mind, and given that algorithms, (and soon big data as well?), are now significant factors in the justice system, can 'algorithmic judges' be far behind? The court system will push back; but inevitably, the job of judging will have to at least be informed by computerized analyses of pertinent data. And eventually, the position of judge might simply be taken over by AI. Yes, that's a long way off, if it ever happens at all - but developments such as 'lawsuit as investment' are among many factors that will further drive the development of artificial intelligence.
On a side note, I seem to recall something recently about automation being poised to take over something like 40% of law practice jobs in the next couple of decades. It seems that even the law biz isn't immune from digital disruption.
even Slashdot qualifies as 'social media'. Given the propensity for over-reach that's been displayed by CBP and associated agencies, visitors to the US might soon be required to supply ALL of their usernames and pseudonyms to border agents. After that, I'm sure the passwords will be demanded too.
The summary leaves out some important information that would tend to blunt the hyperbole it's trying to drive home. From the article:
It stressed that RAND "evaluated a very early version" of the list, "which has since evolved greatly and has been fully integrated with the Department’s management accountability process." It also points out that "the prediction model discussed in the report is the very early, initial model (Version 1), developed in August, 2012. We are now using Version 5, which is significantly improved."
A failing grade on the performance of a four-year-old version of the software, (and a four-year-old set of policies and procedures for using same), is hardly a reason to get all hot 'n' bothered, when what really matters is how the program is working today. It's news, and it may be significant, but it tells us nothing about the current effectiveness of the program in question. There are valid moral, ethical, and possibly legal issues around whether such a program should even exist, and whether the police are the right ones to be managing it - but that conversation shouldn't take place in the context of a FUD-driven summary of an article based largely on very stale data.
back when the transition to 4.x was just beginning. I've also tried it briefly a couple of times since then. My experience is perfectly described from a phrase in TFS:
form-over-function preference
I always felt that in most things KDE cared more about form than about function, and I always found its 'form' to be eye-wateringly blingy. I've always been a form-follows-function kind of guy. One of several reasons I left Windows for Linux was the crappy eye candy that came with XP. (We used to call it Windows 'FP', for 'Fisher-Price'). KDE seemed even worse than XP that way. And at least I could make XP look (mostly) like 2K; but I couldn't find sufficient tools and options to make KDE not look like a tarted-up whore on Saturday night.
And it's too bad, because in my estimation Dolphin is the only file manager in the Linux world that's worth the name. I never liked the look of it, but at least it had the function that I'd been missing from Windows Explorer. I'd be using it now, except its dependencies are pretty much the entire core of KDE; I don't want that bloat, nor do I want the ongoing hassle of resolving config conflicts between KDE and XFCE.
It's sad to think that KDE might be on the ropes, because choice is always a good thing and a sign of health and vibrancy in a community. But if the devs are the narcissistic asshats that have been described in other comments here, and nobody else is stepping in to take up the slack, then maybe its time has come and gone.
I get that digital technology has brought a lot to the party when it comes to efficiency, emissions, and other important performance metrics. But cars are one-tonne-plus hunks of metal which contain human beings and regularly travel at speeds in excess of 30 metres per second. Do we really want them connected to the same Internet used by Nigerian scammers, Ashley Madison hackers, and Donald Trump?
The IOT - I guess it's not just for toasters any more...
... its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.
Bit player?! Do a thought experiment dude - imagine that Linux suddenly popped out of existence at this moment, and picture what would be left of the Internet and the www. As for the rest of your comment, you've already been modded down to hell - so just fuck off, shill.
Slashdot Mirror
if they believe hard enough, a dream big enough, that everything will happen - because after all: technological progress is inevitable. It will never end!
I"m not a 'space nutter'; I'm not even very interested in space exploration. But I have to say that your description, (which you have sarcastically and pejoratively attributed to the space nutters), is in fact a pretty accurate description of much of the past century. When you look at Science Fiction's history of predicting and/or inspiring the kind of technological progress that seems magical by the standards of even a few decades ago, that 'dream big enough and everything will happen' mindset doesn't seem so naive and juvenile as you make it out to be.
I rooted my last HTC, (a Desire 510), but it was kind of a 'partial root'. It gave me root access, and I could do things like manipulate system files and run a firewall that requires root. But I couldn't delete crapps like Facebook, Twitter; or rather, I could, but they'd magically reappear after the next hard boot. I tried changing file permissions, and even set immutable, but a hard boot over-rode the perms and restored the original files. I needed to get the phone into "S-OFF" mode, but apparently that wasn't possible with that model. So I never really had full root priveleges.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Google's new HTC phones either couldn't be fully rooted, or couldn't be rooted at all - especially with Google's attitude getting worse and worse. I really wish Firefox and/or Ubuntu had managed to become viable alternatives to Android.
Those "smart" TV's and "smart" media players have menus/interfaces that can kiss my ass.
If they could kiss your ass, then they could also kiss other things, and the profit margins on smart TV's would be much, MUCH higher than they currently are...
The next great wave of delivered workplace wisdom to be spouted by vastly overpaid flavour-of-the-month management consultants: make all employees, without exception, hand in their cellphones as they arrive in the morning. Of course, the 'important people' in the company will be exempt.
"News nerds don't give a shit about. Stuff that matters only to marketdroids".
teaming up with with the company that drove a spike through the heart of their own "Don't be evil" motto. How appropriate...
If I fly at 1500ft over your property, I'm not entering your property. In fact, the FARs allow for me to get to 500ft over your property. Below that I'm violating minimum altitude rules. Any craft that flies on its own power is an aircraft, remotely piloted or not. And the FAA governs all of that, not the individual states. A state cannot legally prohibit me from flying anywhere, only the FAA can.
So does that mean if I have a hovercraft with a fan powerful enough that I don't have to have the skirt touching the ground, I'm under FAA regs? And I can hover a few inches over anyone's property without being a trespasser in the eyes of the law?
I mention this just to point out that the existing laws seem to be, ummm... 'incomplete', even with regard to pre-drone technology; so they sure as hell aren't up to snuff when it comes to camera-laden RC craft. A whole new set of laws needs to be developed, preferably at the federal level. Otherwise a gust of wind blowing a craft over state lines might get the operator in hot water. Then there's the jurisdictional issue; which state's laws would apply, the one the operator is standing in, or the one the drone is flying over?
"Get off my turf, punk!"
Well if that's true it's one of the most spectacularly boneheaded decisions I've ever heard of. People rely on mapping programs for important stuff.
People who rely on mapping programs for "important stuff" might want to use a service they pay for with money, instead of one that they pay for with their personal data and the availability of their eyeballs. The former tends to come with either explicit or legally assumed obligations on the part of the provider, while the latter has terms and conditions that hold the provider harmless and put the user at a legal disadvantage. Besides, if it's really important, then it's incumbent upon the user to check more than one source.
Many on the left love protectionism...except when they don't.
Many on the right hate protectionism...except when they don't.
Corporations just love having unfettered access to other markets for their products. They also love unrestricted access to supplies of (cheaper) materials and labour in other countries; but let their customers demand the same, and all of a sudden the hypocritical bastards lobby for protectionism, and start spreading FUD about the supposed dangers of products from other countries. Their idea of a 'free market' is really a 'captive market' - one that is kept captive by the legislation they buy, the lies they spread, and the dirty deals they strike with their counterparts in other countries.
Yes, I know that what we now call 'social engineering' has been around for as long as humans existed, and probably longer. But when I say "new tech frontier", I mean the marriage of the scientific method, technological processes, and technologically-gathered data, with more scientifically-rigorous studies and experiments in sociology, psychology, neurology, and biology.
Criminals are now systematically, and probably even experimentally, exploiting employees' psychological and social traits in combination with various technical vulnerabilities. The companies being attacked will feel they have no choice but to respond with their own research and experiments in the area of vetting, monitoring, influencing, and outright brainwashing their employees, (not to mention both prescribing and proscribing certain actions and behaviours), on a 24/7 basis. There will be a lot of science applied to this kind of problem; we're seeing some of it already with things like the Predictive Policing program in Chicago.
George Orwell's work has often been mentioned here on Slashdot, and 1984 was in many ways an eerily prescient work. But if current trends such as those I've outlined above play out as I imagine, we may end up with a less metaphorical, more literal version of Orwell's dystopia.
If anyone at Google gets arrested for linking to infringing content, it will be the end of the Internet as we know it.
If anyone at Google gets arrested for linking to infringing content, it will be the beginning of civilization as we used to know it. You know, that short, golden age when corporate overlords were at least occasionally arrested and jailed for breaking the law, when the average citizen had at least a small say in the policies enacted by their elected representatives, and when corporations actually cared about what their customers thought because those customers were still capable of hurting them financially.
Arrests at Google would be a possible sign of the turning of the tide; hope that 'government by the people, for the people' would stop being an empty, embarrassing slogan; perhaps a harbinger of the playing field at last being levelled, where there would be no distinction before the law between Artem Vaulin and Sergey Brin. Yeah, I know it will never happen, but it's nice to dream sometimes.
BTW, it seems pretty likely that if Vaulin and company had managed to become sufficiently rich and well-connected before the heat was turned up on KAT, they'd be enjoying the kind of immunity and spurious respect that Page and Brin now take for granted. And PS, the Internet might be a more interesting, more vibrant, fairer place if the Googletards and slagvertisers and marketing wankers had left it the fuck alone.
The majority of my friends aren't geeks. What really weirds me out is that they say they wouldn't tell their friends everything about their private lives, but if I tell them that IT admins with access to their entire online life are just people like me, their eyes glaze over.
I try to explain it in simple terms: You don't want me to know this private stuff about you - but in my professional capacity I have access to all this information about you. There are numerous examples of governments with political agendas or individuals with personal agendas abusing access to private information. You are relying on the fact that you will never knowingly or unknowingly get on the wrong side of anybody in that position.
But still, blank.
I have the same problem. I think it has something to do with 'out of sight, out of mind'. If our friends don't know, will likely never meet, and don't know about the people who have access to their private data, then it's easy for them to keep their heads in the sand. It's comfortable, it requires no additional effort, and the threat of having to change their daily routines and upset their social structures feels more imminent and more dangerous than the (in their minds still abstract) threat of having their private info revealed to the world. I think this is partly just a human trait, and partly the result of indoctrination in public schools in an industrial society.
I don't know how to explain it to people. I mean when I was a kid life was simpler, as actions were less likely to have consequences: I'd just go into l33t hax0r mode and obtain files from their machine / school computer account and then show them what I can do...
I just don't know what to do.
I've never been remotely close to being a hacker, never mind 'l33t'. But I also don't know what to do. I offer my friends help with making their online activities safer and more private, and all I hear are crickets. And I'm not talking about ditching Facebook, Twitter, and the like - I'm just talking about ad blockers, NoScript, and a basic education about the types of places and behaviours to avoid. If they won't even do the Internet equivalent of asking a partner about STD's before having sex, how the hell would they ever come to terms with the fact that companies like Facebook are just using them and plundering their very lives for profit? Sometimes I feel like Neo in The Matrix.
...People need to start boycotting companies that do this kind of thing.
The vast majority of people don't care and don't want to know. They've been trained from birth to not be analytical and to follow the herd. For those in power, making "the people" feel powerless is good; making them feel that everything is OK and that they have neither need nor desire for power, is even better.
Also time to bring back anti-trust laws and break up any companies that are "too big to fail".
To a large extent, laws are effectively written and enforced by the companies that are "too big to fail" and their friends. Unless and until corporate hegemony is upended or destroyed this kind of abuse will continue to grow.
Let Asians build the world's fastest trains and the continent-wide energy systems we can only dream about. We have lawsuit AI technology we can use to rob each other blind as we cash those unemployment checks.
Some of those Asians will undoubtedly invest in American lawsuits in order to help fund those trains and energy systems, with the added bonus that they're also helping the competition bankrupt itself.
When your legal system becomes the realm of financial investment trading you KNOW your system is broken.
When your political system becomes the realm of financial investment trading you KNOW the legal system isn't far behind and your society is well and truly fucked.
It's a lot harder to defend the integrity of the system when supposedly impartial actors have quantifiable effects.
With that in mind, and given that algorithms, (and soon big data as well?), are now significant factors in the justice system, can 'algorithmic judges' be far behind? The court system will push back; but inevitably, the job of judging will have to at least be informed by computerized analyses of pertinent data. And eventually, the position of judge might simply be taken over by AI. Yes, that's a long way off, if it ever happens at all - but developments such as 'lawsuit as investment' are among many factors that will further drive the development of artificial intelligence.
On a side note, I seem to recall something recently about automation being poised to take over something like 40% of law practice jobs in the next couple of decades. It seems that even the law biz isn't immune from digital disruption.
Bye, Pokemon!
even Slashdot qualifies as 'social media'. Given the propensity for over-reach that's been displayed by CBP and associated agencies, visitors to the US might soon be required to supply ALL of their usernames and pseudonyms to border agents. After that, I'm sure the passwords will be demanded too.
BTW, this seems to be a dupe of a story first posted here in June: https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Will Samsung 'update' the software in the refurbished phones so they can push ads to them, the way they did with their 'smart' TV's?
The summary leaves out some important information that would tend to blunt the hyperbole it's trying to drive home. From the article:
It stressed that RAND "evaluated a very early version" of the list, "which has since evolved greatly and has been fully integrated with the Department’s management accountability process." It also points out that "the prediction model discussed in the report is the very early, initial model (Version 1), developed in August, 2012. We are now using Version 5, which is significantly improved."
A failing grade on the performance of a four-year-old version of the software, (and a four-year-old set of policies and procedures for using same), is hardly a reason to get all hot 'n' bothered, when what really matters is how the program is working today. It's news, and it may be significant, but it tells us nothing about the current effectiveness of the program in question. There are valid moral, ethical, and possibly legal issues around whether such a program should even exist, and whether the police are the right ones to be managing it - but that conversation shouldn't take place in the context of a FUD-driven summary of an article based largely on very stale data.
back when the transition to 4.x was just beginning. I've also tried it briefly a couple of times since then. My experience is perfectly described from a phrase in TFS:
form-over-function preference
I always felt that in most things KDE cared more about form than about function, and I always found its 'form' to be eye-wateringly blingy. I've always been a form-follows-function kind of guy. One of several reasons I left Windows for Linux was the crappy eye candy that came with XP. (We used to call it Windows 'FP', for 'Fisher-Price'). KDE seemed even worse than XP that way. And at least I could make XP look (mostly) like 2K; but I couldn't find sufficient tools and options to make KDE not look like a tarted-up whore on Saturday night.
And it's too bad, because in my estimation Dolphin is the only file manager in the Linux world that's worth the name. I never liked the look of it, but at least it had the function that I'd been missing from Windows Explorer. I'd be using it now, except its dependencies are pretty much the entire core of KDE; I don't want that bloat, nor do I want the ongoing hassle of resolving config conflicts between KDE and XFCE.
It's sad to think that KDE might be on the ropes, because choice is always a good thing and a sign of health and vibrancy in a community. But if the devs are the narcissistic asshats that have been described in other comments here, and nobody else is stepping in to take up the slack, then maybe its time has come and gone.
I get that digital technology has brought a lot to the party when it comes to efficiency, emissions, and other important performance metrics. But cars are one-tonne-plus hunks of metal which contain human beings and regularly travel at speeds in excess of 30 metres per second. Do we really want them connected to the same Internet used by Nigerian scammers, Ashley Madison hackers, and Donald Trump?
The IOT - I guess it's not just for toasters any more...
I said it before, and I'll say it again - fuck off you slimy shill. And no, we're not your friends, you spoon.
... its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.
Bit player?! Do a thought experiment dude - imagine that Linux suddenly popped out of existence at this moment, and picture what would be left of the Internet and the www. As for the rest of your comment, you've already been modded down to hell - so just fuck off, shill.