What they should have done is require telecoms to verify number ownership. Most of these calls and texts are coming from unknown sources using fake CIDs. If an incoming connection comes from source that is different from the one that 'owns' the number, then you know it's fake.
ie: If 555-1234-5678 is owned by Bell, but you get a connection from a voip provider in India, it's a pretty safe bet that it's not a legit call.
But this would need to be legislated because there's no way any telecom will bother to co-operate with this unless they are forced to.
This reminds me of a company I worked for way back when. I was doing internal IT work. One time, I can't remember the details now, but I screwed something up.
So the first thing I when I realized what happened, was to notify the people who would be most immediately affected, detailing what happened, how it affected them, what I was doing to fix it, and what they should do while I'm fixing it.
The part I remember well was when someone expressed how impressed they were with my integrity. I remember being confused, because I figured this was the least I could do because not doing so would potentially compound the damage orders of magnitude more than the original mistake did.
I was fairly young and inexperienced then, but that plus other incidents made me feel uneasy working there, and I found another job. I found out later that the company went under because of embezzlement a couple years after I left.
So yeah. I guess the lesson here is to be open to warning signs indicating sketchy leadership.
Independence isn't the problem. The problem is that they hired someone who can't do the job due to conflict of interest.
This would be no different if he was voted in or appointed. Of course, the way the rest of this administration is managed, I can't help but go into conspiracy theory territory and think that this was done intentionally to make it harder for the FTC to do it's job.
What I'm getting from this is that people are finally getting fed up with Apple.
Apple charges a completely ridiculous amount of money for purportedly best of breed hardware. And yet, especially lately, people are running into one systemic problem after another, and the only way to get them fixed is to fling class action lawsuits at Apple.
Their last several generations of laptops have had the absolute worst keyboard made in recent history.
Laptops that cost $3+k but are unrepairable and unupgradable. They are pointlessly thin which causes them to have to make concessions in their designs that a normal manufacturer would never need to make. This ends up limiting performance, and reducing reliability and longevity. But that's again to Apple's benefit because now they get to soak you a second time with exorbitant repair bills.
The most recent versions of OSX have been the least stable I've ever used. I haven't even upgraded to Mojave yet because 10.13 has caused me so many problems that I'm afraid of how much more damage 10.14 is going to cause.
I have enough disposable income that I have no problem dropping a higher than avg amount of cash for a top notch product. But I damn well demand exactly that: a top notch product. Apple used to be my computer mfg of choice because they were overwhelmingly superior to the competition. But starting around 2010, when they started gluing their batteries into the machines, was when they jumped off the cliff and have been falling since.
While the recent update to the mac mini is encouraging, I am treating that a a blip rather than a concerted effort within Apple to crowbar their heads out of their asses. And now the sharks are starting to circle, and I for one am happy to see them do it. Apple desperately needs a big dose of humility.
IMO Apple wouldn't be doing nearly as well right now if, despite how badly they've been screwing up, Microsoft wasn't also screwing up but 10x worse with their management of Windows 10. And I think Apple is fully aware of this.
I just don't get what the big deal is about 5G. LTE is already so fast it does everything I could possibly want with a mobile device. The only way more speed would be of value would be if I needed to regularly deal with multi-gigabyte files while on the train or something. Which would never happen anyway because the average mobile company is so stingy with the total monthly bandwidth that I'd never do that anyway. Which again, makes 5G basically pointless except for the super wealthy.
> "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
Sp after having 30 years of (de facto) standardization, we're moving back to 5 billions ways to do anything, all of which are mutually incompatible with each other and all trying to get customer lock-in so that it's harder for people to switch away, and thus forcing everyone to either purchase multiple subscriptions for multiple tools or be stuck.
How many of these supposed new generation tools support standard file formats like Open Office's OOXML (As opposed to Microsoft anything-but OpenXML)? Probably less than one hand worth, if even that.
That requires a minimum level of computer-savvy-ness that said family members do not have. If so much as a single window is in a different position than expected, I get a phone call. Moving them to Macs has helped out a phenominally, but these are the kind of people that Apple was thinking of when they decided not to implement 2 button mice.
I can understand why they added that limitation. Everyone and their goldfish was using subfolders and polluting them with every damn useless thing imaginable. Links to uninstallers (Because the control panel wasn't good enough?) . Readme files. All sorts of nonsense, and just made everything convoluted and that much more difficult to find the thing you actually needed.
OSX for example, allows for folders but generally discourages them unless there's a specific need for it. I find it jarring and irritating when I install an app and suddenly there's new folder I have to dig through. At this point I now equate program sub-folders with developers who don't really know how (or care to) to package their products cleanly. Cisco is the first example the pops into my head.
That's what momentum gets you, and why Microsoft can charge whatever they want and people have to pay (or pirate). I'm sure there are plenty of IT departments that would *love* to get away from Office. But even if they want to, they can't because staff insist on using it, and supporting multiple suites of tools is just not realistic when you have a large userbase.
I #%^&@$%ing hate those things, cause it invariably resutls in a paniced call from family urgently insisting on my help. Especially when it makes that obnoxious beeping noise.
Rolling your own MFA would be a nightmare, considering how tightly the security needs to be controlled, so while what the parent says is true, sometimes it's just not practical.
That means if you need to outsource to a vendor, that vendor has to be rock solid. Microsoft has a demonstrable track record of *not* being able to keep their infrastructure up, so I'm honestly dumbfounded that anybody would use their software willingly. Office365 is one thing because you really don't have a choice, and you can at least run the local version (unless Microsoft breaks the big brother functionality) but I would *never* trust mission-critical infrastructure to be managed by Microsoft.
Nope. If an operating system breaks any userland program, it's always the operating system which should be blamed.
Tell that to Apple. They've always maintained the attitude of "We'll change the OS however we please and it's up to app developers to keep up."
IMO Apple wouldn't be doing nearly as well as they are if Microsoft hadn't fucked up just so utterly badly with Windows 10. No matter how bullshit their hardware gets, they're still in the lead cause OSX isn't as much of a clusterfuck as Windows is.
As soon as I saw that, my warning klaxxon went off. The last time I had to deal with someone like they, it turned out that they were hopelessly unskilled with computers, and they blamed literally everything on the tech person rather than their own ineptitude.
Someone who really knows what they're doing with Windows is going to be expensive. And even if they are that good, they can't work miracles, especially when it comes to Microsoft's shit-tastic abomination Windows 10. You can do everything right, and STILL get screwed because Microsoft botched yet another update.
From the few details gleaned from the summary, I don't think there is an "IT Consultant" on the planet that would be satisfactory. Also... small tip? If the costs for the existing consultant are noticeably going up as times goes on, that's a strong indicator that said consultant is fed up with you and wants more money just for putting up with you. They don't want to outright deny your business cause that looks bad on them, but raising their rates sharply means they are hoping you'll move on to someone else.
Because you have no formal programming knowledge, you don't know what you don't know.
There are entire realms of rigour involved with software development that help create quality, self-documenting, maintainable code. Strong types are just one aspect of that, because if you make a type error you will know at compile time, rather than runtime or possibly never.
It's not a matter of "can't follow what all the variables are". Mistakes can and will be made. Furthermore, as someone more bluntly responded, once you get to more complex and larger code-bases, you *can't* follow what all the variables are because you would have to remember thousands or 10s of thousands of not just basic types but god knows how many classes.
Ah I see. Without going back to the article (because that would be against Slashdot's most cherished values...), I can definitely agree with the quoted statement and what you're saying.
HFT is a parasite on an already questionable system. It provides nothing of value to anyone except the people using it, and in fact it costs the entire system money by raising costs for everyone trading legitimately.
Too many slashdot'ers subscribe to the technocratic believe that unrestrained technology is always good, without considering the real-world impact and how it can and will be abused. Social media is a perfect example of this. HFT is another great example.
The problem is that Facebook's business model is the only one that will work until and unless there is a major shift in cultural attitudes.
As long as people do not value their privacy, and are unwilling to pay even a tiny token amount for a service they use, then the data harvesting model is the only way to go.
The only other possible alternatives are gov't run services paid by taxes, or relying on a large network of altruistic people to maintain everything. I think we can all agree on the likelihood of those options working.
Facebook is the inevitable consequence, and the average person that made Facebook possible have only themselves to blame.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. The irony is that I *didn't* fully think it through or I wouldn't have made half those suggestions. A lot of them have a very dangerous slippery slope that won't end well.
However, I do believe that software developers need to be regulated in the same way Engineers are. Developers need to prove they understand basic principals. That they understand security.
And companies need to start being held accountable for the products they produce. We are seeing on an almost daily basis the consequences of letting companies put out poor quality products, and it is never going to get better until there is accountability.
You're right. I was in a mood and didn't think through what I was writing.
I am, however, convinced that software developers need to be regulated in the same way that Engineers are. They need to be certified that they understand basic software development principals. They need to understand security.
And I missed the single most important one: Companies need to be held liable for their bugs. Computers are now so entrenched in every aspect of our daily lives that having a lassez-faire attitude to development doesn't cut it anymore. We're seeing the consequences of that on a daily basis. And the situation will never improve until companies are held accountable for the products they make, just like every other manufacturing industry in existence.
For decades everyone has been focused on how to make the internet easier. How to make developing software easier. Etc etc.
And what is the result? People who can't be trusted to safely flip a burger, writing mission critical code. Security catastrophe after security catastrophe. People getting lynched and burned alive because of rumors. A complete and utter lack of accountability to anyone by anyone.
And things will never get any better until that accountability is enforced. Software developers need to be regulated just like Engineers are. Knowing how to code isn't good enough. You have to understand WHY a given piece of code is appropriate for a given situation. You have to understand the security implications of the code you are writing.
Programming languages and frameworks need to regulated. They need to maintain minimum levels of stability, reliablility and security. New languages and frameworks are coming out all faster than they can be adopted. And a majority of them are absolute turds that are completely unfit for use, eventually being abandoned when the devs get bored. This makes maintainability of new software virtually impossible.
Certain forms of access need to be regulated. For example, anyone that wants to send email needs to register their server with a central authority. Not registered? Recipient servers ignore it. And then if outbound email was taxed at even as little as 0.0001% per message, that would be nothing to the average person or company, but it would shut down spammers overnight.
But none of this will ever happen because there is no political impetus to do so. Politicians wouldn't know what to do and would likely bollocks it up. Tech people would freak out for a variety of reasons ("New is good, old is bad, no matter what", NIHS, Ego, "Move fast and break things", etc)
And they're wrong on that count too. Yes, there are fluctuations in earth's temperatures, but the only times they've changed this drastically is during a cataclysmic event.
Slashdot Mirror
Running windows? Wrong, they don't, they have at least that much of a clue.
You sure about that? Hell, I remember when they announced that *nuclear submarines* would be running on *Windows NT*.
So much for "military grade security".
What they should have done is require telecoms to verify number ownership. Most of these calls and texts are coming from unknown sources using fake CIDs. If an incoming connection comes from source that is different from the one that 'owns' the number, then you know it's fake.
ie: If 555-1234-5678 is owned by Bell, but you get a connection from a voip provider in India, it's a pretty safe bet that it's not a legit call.
But this would need to be legislated because there's no way any telecom will bother to co-operate with this unless they are forced to.
Luxury! I had to program my computer using steel and flint, trying to aim the spark at the correct set of rocks to set each bit!
This reminds me of a company I worked for way back when. I was doing internal IT work. One time, I can't remember the details now, but I screwed something up.
So the first thing I when I realized what happened, was to notify the people who would be most immediately affected, detailing what happened, how it affected them, what I was doing to fix it, and what they should do while I'm fixing it.
The part I remember well was when someone expressed how impressed they were with my integrity. I remember being confused, because I figured this was the least I could do because not doing so would potentially compound the damage orders of magnitude more than the original mistake did.
I was fairly young and inexperienced then, but that plus other incidents made me feel uneasy working there, and I found another job. I found out later that the company went under because of embezzlement a couple years after I left.
So yeah. I guess the lesson here is to be open to warning signs indicating sketchy leadership.
Independence isn't the problem. The problem is that they hired someone who can't do the job due to conflict of interest.
This would be no different if he was voted in or appointed. Of course, the way the rest of this administration is managed, I can't help but go into conspiracy theory territory and think that this was done intentionally to make it harder for the FTC to do it's job.
What I'm getting from this is that people are finally getting fed up with Apple.
Apple charges a completely ridiculous amount of money for purportedly best of breed hardware. And yet, especially lately, people are running into one systemic problem after another, and the only way to get them fixed is to fling class action lawsuits at Apple.
Their last several generations of laptops have had the absolute worst keyboard made in recent history.
Laptops that cost $3+k but are unrepairable and unupgradable. They are pointlessly thin which causes them to have to make concessions in their designs that a normal manufacturer would never need to make. This ends up limiting performance, and reducing reliability and longevity. But that's again to Apple's benefit because now they get to soak you a second time with exorbitant repair bills.
The most recent versions of OSX have been the least stable I've ever used. I haven't even upgraded to Mojave yet because 10.13 has caused me so many problems that I'm afraid of how much more damage 10.14 is going to cause.
I have enough disposable income that I have no problem dropping a higher than avg amount of cash for a top notch product. But I damn well demand exactly that: a top notch product. Apple used to be my computer mfg of choice because they were overwhelmingly superior to the competition. But starting around 2010, when they started gluing their batteries into the machines, was when they jumped off the cliff and have been falling since.
While the recent update to the mac mini is encouraging, I am treating that a a blip rather than a concerted effort within Apple to crowbar their heads out of their asses. And now the sharks are starting to circle, and I for one am happy to see them do it. Apple desperately needs a big dose of humility.
IMO Apple wouldn't be doing nearly as well right now if, despite how badly they've been screwing up, Microsoft wasn't also screwing up but 10x worse with their management of Windows 10. And I think Apple is fully aware of this.
I just don't get what the big deal is about 5G. LTE is already so fast it does everything I could possibly want with a mobile device. The only way more speed would be of value would be if I needed to regularly deal with multi-gigabyte files while on the train or something. Which would never happen anyway because the average mobile company is so stingy with the total monthly bandwidth that I'd never do that anyway. Which again, makes 5G basically pointless except for the super wealthy.
Oh please, we all know that their REAL missions is to make contact with the secret Nazi base built on the dark side of the moon.
I mean, hasn't anyone watched Iron Sky?
> "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
Sp after having 30 years of (de facto) standardization, we're moving back to 5 billions ways to do anything, all of which are mutually incompatible with each other and all trying to get customer lock-in so that it's harder for people to switch away, and thus forcing everyone to either purchase multiple subscriptions for multiple tools or be stuck.
How many of these supposed new generation tools support standard file formats like Open Office's OOXML (As opposed to Microsoft anything-but OpenXML)? Probably less than one hand worth, if even that.
ROFLMAO.
That requires a minimum level of computer-savvy-ness that said family members do not have. If so much as a single window is in a different position than expected, I get a phone call. Moving them to Macs has helped out a phenominally, but these are the kind of people that Apple was thinking of when they decided not to implement 2 button mice.
I can understand why they added that limitation. Everyone and their goldfish was using subfolders and polluting them with every damn useless thing imaginable. Links to uninstallers (Because the control panel wasn't good enough?) . Readme files. All sorts of nonsense, and just made everything convoluted and that much more difficult to find the thing you actually needed.
OSX for example, allows for folders but generally discourages them unless there's a specific need for it. I find it jarring and irritating when I install an app and suddenly there's new folder I have to dig through. At this point I now equate program sub-folders with developers who don't really know how (or care to) to package their products cleanly. Cisco is the first example the pops into my head.
That's what momentum gets you, and why Microsoft can charge whatever they want and people have to pay (or pirate). I'm sure there are plenty of IT departments that would *love* to get away from Office. But even if they want to, they can't because staff insist on using it, and supporting multiple suites of tools is just not realistic when you have a large userbase.
I #%^&@$%ing hate those things, cause it invariably resutls in a paniced call from family urgently insisting on my help. Especially when it makes that obnoxious beeping noise.
Jail isn't good enough for these slime.
Rolling your own MFA would be a nightmare, considering how tightly the security needs to be controlled, so while what the parent says is true, sometimes it's just not practical.
That means if you need to outsource to a vendor, that vendor has to be rock solid. Microsoft has a demonstrable track record of *not* being able to keep their infrastructure up, so I'm honestly dumbfounded that anybody would use their software willingly. Office365 is one thing because you really don't have a choice, and you can at least run the local version (unless Microsoft breaks the big brother functionality) but I would *never* trust mission-critical infrastructure to be managed by Microsoft.
Nope. If an operating system breaks any userland program, it's always the operating system which should be blamed.
Tell that to Apple. They've always maintained the attitude of "We'll change the OS however we please and it's up to app developers to keep up."
IMO Apple wouldn't be doing nearly as well as they are if Microsoft hadn't fucked up just so utterly badly with Windows 10. No matter how bullshit their hardware gets, they're still in the lead cause OSX isn't as much of a clusterfuck as Windows is.
they don't resolve issues to her satisfaction
As soon as I saw that, my warning klaxxon went off. The last time I had to deal with someone like they, it turned out that they were hopelessly unskilled with computers, and they blamed literally everything on the tech person rather than their own ineptitude.
Someone who really knows what they're doing with Windows is going to be expensive. And even if they are that good, they can't work miracles, especially when it comes to Microsoft's shit-tastic abomination Windows 10. You can do everything right, and STILL get screwed because Microsoft botched yet another update.
From the few details gleaned from the summary, I don't think there is an "IT Consultant" on the planet that would be satisfactory. Also... small tip? If the costs for the existing consultant are noticeably going up as times goes on, that's a strong indicator that said consultant is fed up with you and wants more money just for putting up with you. They don't want to outright deny your business cause that looks bad on them, but raising their rates sharply means they are hoping you'll move on to someone else.
Because you have no formal programming knowledge, you don't know what you don't know.
There are entire realms of rigour involved with software development that help create quality, self-documenting, maintainable code. Strong types are just one aspect of that, because if you make a type error you will know at compile time, rather than runtime or possibly never.
It's not a matter of "can't follow what all the variables are". Mistakes can and will be made. Furthermore, as someone more bluntly responded, once you get to more complex and larger code-bases, you *can't* follow what all the variables are because you would have to remember thousands or 10s of thousands of not just basic types but god knows how many classes.
Ah I see. Without going back to the article (because that would be against Slashdot's most cherished values...), I can definitely agree with the quoted statement and what you're saying.
HFT is a parasite on an already questionable system. It provides nothing of value to anyone except the people using it, and in fact it costs the entire system money by raising costs for everyone trading legitimately.
Too many slashdot'ers subscribe to the technocratic believe that unrestrained technology is always good, without considering the real-world impact and how it can and will be abused. Social media is a perfect example of this. HFT is another great example.
Just as long as she wiped it afterward with a cloth.
How many paid it though?
The problem is that Facebook's business model is the only one that will work until and unless there is a major shift in cultural attitudes.
As long as people do not value their privacy, and are unwilling to pay even a tiny token amount for a service they use, then the data harvesting model is the only way to go.
The only other possible alternatives are gov't run services paid by taxes, or relying on a large network of altruistic people to maintain everything. I think we can all agree on the likelihood of those options working.
Facebook is the inevitable consequence, and the average person that made Facebook possible have only themselves to blame.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. The irony is that I *didn't* fully think it through or I wouldn't have made half those suggestions. A lot of them have a very dangerous slippery slope that won't end well.
However, I do believe that software developers need to be regulated in the same way Engineers are. Developers need to prove they understand basic principals. That they understand security.
And companies need to start being held accountable for the products they produce. We are seeing on an almost daily basis the consequences of letting companies put out poor quality products, and it is never going to get better until there is accountability.
You're right. I was in a mood and didn't think through what I was writing.
I am, however, convinced that software developers need to be regulated in the same way that Engineers are. They need to be certified that they understand basic software development principals. They need to understand security.
And I missed the single most important one: Companies need to be held liable for their bugs. Computers are now so entrenched in every aspect of our daily lives that having a lassez-faire attitude to development doesn't cut it anymore. We're seeing the consequences of that on a daily basis. And the situation will never improve until companies are held accountable for the products they make, just like every other manufacturing industry in existence.
Yes. Just Yes.
For decades everyone has been focused on how to make the internet easier. How to make developing software easier. Etc etc.
And what is the result? People who can't be trusted to safely flip a burger, writing mission critical code. Security catastrophe after security catastrophe. People getting lynched and burned alive because of rumors. A complete and utter lack of accountability to anyone by anyone.
And things will never get any better until that accountability is enforced. Software developers need to be regulated just like Engineers are. Knowing how to code isn't good enough. You have to understand WHY a given piece of code is appropriate for a given situation. You have to understand the security implications of the code you are writing.
Programming languages and frameworks need to regulated. They need to maintain minimum levels of stability, reliablility and security. New languages and frameworks are coming out all faster than they can be adopted. And a majority of them are absolute turds that are completely unfit for use, eventually being abandoned when the devs get bored. This makes maintainability of new software virtually impossible.
Certain forms of access need to be regulated. For example, anyone that wants to send email needs to register their server with a central authority. Not registered? Recipient servers ignore it. And then if outbound email was taxed at even as little as 0.0001% per message, that would be nothing to the average person or company, but it would shut down spammers overnight.
But none of this will ever happen because there is no political impetus to do so. Politicians wouldn't know what to do and would likely bollocks it up. Tech people would freak out for a variety of reasons ("New is good, old is bad, no matter what", NIHS, Ego, "Move fast and break things", etc)
So... *shrug*
And they're wrong on that count too. Yes, there are fluctuations in earth's temperatures, but the only times they've changed this drastically is during a cataclysmic event.
WE are the current cataclysmic event.