We're you asked for a password for accessing the data? If not, then you really shouldn't be surprised. What did you think it was doing? It can't meaningfully encrypt it without a key.
Given that it's widespread across huge numbers of people, presumably of all kinds and intelligence levels, I think that dismissing the problem as being because people are too lazy/stupid is...well....lazy and stupid.
Remember that people treat their computers like a social being - and a subordinate one at that. Every morning, someone will go and sit down at their office computer and find it's forgotten who he is, even though it sees him every day. He can walk away for an hour and it'll forget again. It'll fail to understand that he's him over and over again as he uses websites, servers, etc, stopping each time to refuse his instructions and demand that he perform some silly little task purely to help the computer out in functioning correctly: remember an irrelevant string of nonsense. And, very occasionally, the computer will fail and do something like send banking details to someone in Russia, or show his ex-wife his e-mails to his lawyer.....even though it's blatantly obvious to even an imbecile that these are the wrong things to do.
We all know that computers are unintelligent tools that are not capable of doing better than this - on slashdot, at least. But it still feels like talking to a forgetful, obstructive, naive, reckless, stupid and insubordinate little shit. Even the most stupid of assistants should be expected to do better most of the time.
People can certainly do better, but we have to accept that humans behave like humans and recognize that we're going to need to improve the technology as well as people's habits. In the short term that could mean things like providing ways to generate secure passphrases and asking them to write them down, using authentication devices and using UIs to promote better practices....and we need security researchers who stop looking a memory dumps for a while and look for more secure ways to interact with users.
If the highly rich we're left to their own they'd starve to death, whilst trying to manage each other and stab each other in the back. Their money would have little value if they couldn't use it to obtain huge quantities of other people's output, at vast multiples of those people's hours of work compared to what's required of their own. Money and economic exchange is a fundamentally social bargain, not private property. It's not illegitimate to democratically adjust it (it's just much more often a bad idea than people might like).
Any individual in China can also make that argument (even more so than a Norweigan, I'd guess). You don't suddenly become relieved of responsibility for your effect on others just because there are fewer people who identify with your country than with that big dirty nasty one over there.
There's something else Google could do, too, if there were ever so much wind and solar that electricity became sufficiently extremely expensive when it's dark and calm compared to when it isn't: power off servers there and route more traffic somewhere light or windy. Or, say, leave the spidering for later. Given the the cost of servers and bandwidth it might have to be seriously extreme, mind.
There will also be adverse selection. A non tracking policy will disproportionately attract bad drivers and you'll have to pay higher premiums because of the higher average accident rate. Then the safest of those will have more incentive to switch and the average accident rate will go up again, etc. the privacy conscious are just too small a group to stop this market collapsing, I suspect.
It usually works like this: The official exchange rate gives you, say, X10 per $1 and the black market rate X100 per $1. (Which happens because the official rate is not one which balances supply and demand). So, everyone wants to sell $s at the black market rate and buy at the official rate. The government then forces everyone they can who has dollars to sell - legal exporters and their customers, for example - to do so at the official exchange rate. This gives them a small source of official dollars. Most people can't get these, there are too few, so they go to people the government likes. eg, bribe-givers, political allies, ruling politicians and their families, etc. Those lucky people can then immediately sell them on the black market at huge profit, or import goods very cheaply which they can either use or sell at huge profit. You could also use it simply to bankrupt all of the private companies you don't like to support the ones you do (until you run out, of course).
I don't know any specifics about the Venezuelan government, but governments doing this usually have no incentive to fix it. Much easier to use it as a source of power, wealth and patronage.
Both sides assert that the islands are theirs because it's popular. Everyone likes to see their country have shiny things, especially if it means getting one over on another country. And it's a convenient (yuck) patriotic distraction from the governments' other failings. And the war made it much harder for their to be any sort of peaceful settlement...when hundreds of people die defending something it gets a lot harder for politicians to explain wanting to go back on their earlier position. (I think people should remember, however, that the islands were attacked by a military dictatorship but now claimed by a democracy(-ish)).
The arguments advanced by the two sides I think have little relation to the real reasons and are never going to get anyone anywhere. Argentinians cite geography and the bit of its history they like. The British cite the bits of history/they/ like, and the opinion of the residents. Both have counter-arguments to anything the other side can say.
Meanwhile it makes not the slightest difference to the lives of almost anybody in the two countries.
They're not exactly high calorie. Perfectly reasonable choices in terms of growing nice food ('value creation' as they put it), though I can't help wondering if they'll get the mother of all red spider mite infestations. Arab countries have bought huge amounts of African farmland in attempt to gain some food security, and if you assume it's for that purpose instead then you might have expected different choices. Still not radishes, though.
You've missed an option: that governments should stop drawing lines around everyone and forcing their lives in to country shaped boxes. Why should the world's governments have the right to tell us where we should and shouldn't live?
Of course, it's more than a little difficult practically, not to mention against the interest of many people in some countries, which is why it isn't done that way any more.
They'll spend at least a week trying to find and set up desks, obtain computers, work out how everything works in the office, set up their development environments, go through 'if there's a fire walk out of the door' training and so on. That's assuming they're not spending all their time urgently finding a new home, new schools and movers (or just a new job).
Then they'll spend another week or two being really pissed off at the disruption. People generally do get pissed off at change, but it's worse if you're suddenly finding your working day is two hours longer with no extra pay because you have to trudge back and forth to the office (which always feels the worst at first). That'll be worse for some than others because of different distances and because no doubt some will be using extra time and flexibility to drive children to school or nursery. Then they'll be pissed off at having to use work computers which aren't set how they like them, don't have the extra monitor, don't have the special keyboard/mouse they find more comfortable, have an cheap uncomfortable chair they didn't choose carefully for themselves. And, of course, they'll be pissed off at the sudden noise and annoyance that kills developer productivity in offices.
People get used to those things - although quality of life will no doubt be persistently lower, and people don't really get used to increased noise. I can't help thinking that some will have reduced working hours because there just aren't enough hours in the day any more, and that some will be looking for a better deal with other employers.
Working in an office has some advantages, of course....but even if it works perfectly there's going to be a big one-off cost, as well as a bunch of ongoing disadvantages.
I suspect there's more to it than that. Every now and then, after some sort of crisis, companies do actually give it a try anyway and fail. And it isn't even all that expensive to take many neglected security measures. Instead, I think that you have to look at the goals of people involved, and what does and doesn't give them a sense of achievement. Managers want to push through their latest project, developers want to finish good quality software with some neat new design, salesman want to close the next deal, and so on. Not just management recognition, but personal satisfaction comes from doing those things, and not from doing them securely. Security is a distraction and barrier between them and what they want to achieve, not something to be proud of.
If you believe Bitcoins to be a Jolly Good Thing, you could also consider the benefits imposed on society and not just his private gains. Central banks spend more on creating some forms of cash than they're worth, but it may still be socially useful because the benefit to the whole economy is all of the economic activity enabled by having a means of exchange etc., and not its face value. It'd have to be rather astonishing to reach $561,000, though - not to mention that theft needs to be discouraged and punished anyway.
I think that might be a bit simplistic....apart from anything else, you'd have to ask 'why should they care so much about that?'. The reasons suggested for why religion exists and is held so strongly are quite numerous, and I'd expect quite a few to be true. For example:
Religion is evolutionarily useful to humans because it helps a group perform acts of high altruism towards each other without becoming unable to perform acts of extreme warfare on the tribe next door with different beliefs. If you think of anything which becomes hotly debated like evolution vs creationism as a potential group marker, you could consider a battle over it in schools to be a battle over a child's group affiliation.
Religions are like mind-viruses that exploit human mental weaknesses, and the successful ones have evolved to do this better than others. One way to be successful is to co-opt humans' moral sense and transmission mechanism. Humans have an urge to transmit their codes of morality, especially to children, and so religions (like Christianity) which make their followers believe that belief is morally good will produce believers who honestly and fervently try very hard to push an environment on children which will make them believe the same. And, of course, morality involves emotions like disgust and admiration that don't disappear just because you realize they're illogical.
Religions were invented as ways to explain in the absence of a better method: to explain how the world is how it is, and also to explain why we have moral feelings. But as it's passed down generations the religious then take it as a reliable source of knowledge and so a challenge to this method of knowledge gathering becomes a challenge to the validity of morality (as they see it).
Religion comes from detecting agency where there is none. When humans see something happening/moving/whatever it's safer to assume something is behind it (like a predator) and run, and so humans are biased towards this. Apply this to trees falling, storms happening, floods, and build from there. So this plays to people's fears that there's something huge and dangerous there you don't want to annoy or challenge. Saying 'you didn't do all this!' in the face of a perceived claim of the opposite is quite a big challenge.
Mm. I can't help thinking that it's dangerous to do what he did without a great deal of care. Not because being away from social media on an iThing for a while isn't perfectly fine, but because of the risk of parents trying to impose their own personality traits on their children. I didn't spend my pre-iThing youth outside kicking a ball around, I spent it indoors reading books, learning to play the piano, experimenting with amateur electronics and learning to program a BBC B. Parents who think their children should be an extrovert when they're not, or should be sporty when they're not, or should be intellectual bookish types when they're not, or who try to force their own childhood on them, could just be holding back their children from exploring something which could be important and enriching for them.
PCI DSS is a contractual requirement and not a regulatory requirement or a law. Card data thieves of all kinds aren't under any legal obligation to follow it because they haven't signed any contracts requiring it. Unless, of course, you think the NSA has a merchant account.
Of course it's not a good thing! Look around you at how many things there are worth doing with your life. Even if the basic dreary parts of production could be automated, there's no shortage of stuff out there to engage in - from the social, family and exploratory (travel the world, anyone?) to the intellectual (learning, research and the arts).
The problem with it is not that it's physically impossible for everyone to live a happy life that way, but that it's socially and economically impossible. The way our society and economy works just can't cope with distributing that output well in those circumstances. At the moment the need for labour acts as a way to force that distribution, but imagine if controlling capital (the automated machines) were the only way to receive anything above a minimum politically acceptable income.
A good example are the oil rich economies. There's enough oil money in some gulf states that no citizen really needs to do much useful work...but distribution of consumption becomes about political power and your position in society.
To deal with it well we'd need a way to distribute ownership of the robotics properly - and keep it distributed properly - without destroying the incentives every economy needs to generate to organize it's production and consumption effectively. That's hard.
Don't assume that this means they're just like any other bank in your country, though (unless, I suppose, you're in Luxembourg). For example, PayPal are not legally required to submit to UK banking ombudsman decisions (but, AIUI, they've voluntarily agreed to). If you get in to a dispute you're always going to be better off with a proper bank which is locally regulated, required to follow ALL of those regulations not just the ones it chooses, and somewhere with rules and a jurisdiction you and your lawyers/advisers/regulators/courts are familiar with.
If you're any sort of serious business you should go to a bank and get a proper merchant account instead. For me, nothing screams 'part-time trader who normally only uses eBay' than someone accepting money only via PayPal.
Bigger multi-million turnover customer might get a better deal (but how many of those do you see accepting PayPal?), but PayPal's model seems to be to essentially very cheaply bulk 'retail' payment accounts with almost everything automated. I think that's one reason so many people have problems - do anything outside their idea of mainstream and their computer will freeze your account. And you can forget the idea of trying to talk to a human - if you do, all you'll get is one who's not much more than a voice recognition system for their computer. Having to put some actual effort in to dealing with someone properly seems to be just too expensive for their model.....easier to just go with the flawed computer risk model, shut someone out, and make your money from the next person.
There isn't anything shameful about being HIV positive or legal forms of pervert (and some illegal ones, depending on where you live) either. All of these groups are widely discriminated against, though:( You probably don't want your insurance company, prospective employer or the policeman accusing you of speeding to know.
And in the UK the public debate is all about political positioning and projecting an image to the electorate. At the moment it's about whether they should 'teach values' and about whether parents, charities, etc. should be able to set up new taxpayer funded schools in areas with enough places. In the past team sports have been promoted, streaming and not streaming have, faith-based schools have, and so on. It's always about political symbolism, not education.
Umm.....so someone uses an ETag legitimately on their dynamic site, and you respond by DDoSing them? That's sort of the problem.....you have no idea if they're tracking you or not, and a great deal of wanted legitimate content will come with ETags.
Slashdot Mirror
We're you asked for a password for accessing the data? If not, then you really shouldn't be surprised. What did you think it was doing? It can't meaningfully encrypt it without a key.
Yes, it goes to the sewage treatment plant. And /then/ it (or some of it) goes in to the ocean: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16709045 http://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/272na2.pdf (you'll find more with Google).
I bet you still wash clothes made from plastic fibres in an ordinary washing machine, though. Guess where the waste goes...
Given that it's widespread across huge numbers of people, presumably of all kinds and intelligence levels, I think that dismissing the problem as being because people are too lazy/stupid is...well....lazy and stupid.
Remember that people treat their computers like a social being - and a subordinate one at that. Every morning, someone will go and sit down at their office computer and find it's forgotten who he is, even though it sees him every day. He can walk away for an hour and it'll forget again. It'll fail to understand that he's him over and over again as he uses websites, servers, etc, stopping each time to refuse his instructions and demand that he perform some silly little task purely to help the computer out in functioning correctly: remember an irrelevant string of nonsense. And, very occasionally, the computer will fail and do something like send banking details to someone in Russia, or show his ex-wife his e-mails to his lawyer.....even though it's blatantly obvious to even an imbecile that these are the wrong things to do.
We all know that computers are unintelligent tools that are not capable of doing better than this - on slashdot, at least. But it still feels like talking to a forgetful, obstructive, naive, reckless, stupid and insubordinate little shit. Even the most stupid of assistants should be expected to do better most of the time.
People can certainly do better, but we have to accept that humans behave like humans and recognize that we're going to need to improve the technology as well as people's habits. In the short term that could mean things like providing ways to generate secure passphrases and asking them to write them down, using authentication devices and using UIs to promote better practices....and we need security researchers who stop looking a memory dumps for a while and look for more secure ways to interact with users.
If the highly rich we're left to their own they'd starve to death, whilst trying to manage each other and stab each other in the back. Their money would have little value if they couldn't use it to obtain huge quantities of other people's output, at vast multiples of those people's hours of work compared to what's required of their own. Money and economic exchange is a fundamentally social bargain, not private property. It's not illegitimate to democratically adjust it (it's just much more often a bad idea than people might like).
Any individual in China can also make that argument (even more so than a Norweigan, I'd guess). You don't suddenly become relieved of responsibility for your effect on others just because there are fewer people who identify with your country than with that big dirty nasty one over there.
There's something else Google could do, too, if there were ever so much wind and solar that electricity became sufficiently extremely expensive when it's dark and calm compared to when it isn't: power off servers there and route more traffic somewhere light or windy. Or, say, leave the spidering for later. Given the the cost of servers and bandwidth it might have to be seriously extreme, mind.
There will also be adverse selection. A non tracking policy will disproportionately attract bad drivers and you'll have to pay higher premiums because of the higher average accident rate. Then the safest of those will have more incentive to switch and the average accident rate will go up again, etc. the privacy conscious are just too small a group to stop this market collapsing, I suspect.
It usually works like this: The official exchange rate gives you, say, X10 per $1 and the black market rate X100 per $1. (Which happens because the official rate is not one which balances supply and demand). So, everyone wants to sell $s at the black market rate and buy at the official rate. The government then forces everyone they can who has dollars to sell - legal exporters and their customers, for example - to do so at the official exchange rate. This gives them a small source of official dollars. Most people can't get these, there are too few, so they go to people the government likes. eg, bribe-givers, political allies, ruling politicians and their families, etc. Those lucky people can then immediately sell them on the black market at huge profit, or import goods very cheaply which they can either use or sell at huge profit. You could also use it simply to bankrupt all of the private companies you don't like to support the ones you do (until you run out, of course).
I don't know any specifics about the Venezuelan government, but governments doing this usually have no incentive to fix it. Much easier to use it as a source of power, wealth and patronage.
Both sides assert that the islands are theirs because it's popular. Everyone likes to see their country have shiny things, especially if it means getting one over on another country. And it's a convenient (yuck) patriotic distraction from the governments' other failings. And the war made it much harder for their to be any sort of peaceful settlement...when hundreds of people die defending something it gets a lot harder for politicians to explain wanting to go back on their earlier position. (I think people should remember, however, that the islands were attacked by a military dictatorship but now claimed by a democracy(-ish)).
The arguments advanced by the two sides I think have little relation to the real reasons and are never going to get anyone anywhere. Argentinians cite geography and the bit of its history they like. The British cite the bits of history /they/ like, and the opinion of the residents. Both have counter-arguments to anything the other side can say.
Meanwhile it makes not the slightest difference to the lives of almost anybody in the two countries.
They're not exactly high calorie. Perfectly reasonable choices in terms of growing nice food ('value creation' as they put it), though I can't help wondering if they'll get the mother of all red spider mite infestations. Arab countries have bought huge amounts of African farmland in attempt to gain some food security, and if you assume it's for that purpose instead then you might have expected different choices. Still not radishes, though.
You've missed an option: that governments should stop drawing lines around everyone and forcing their lives in to country shaped boxes. Why should the world's governments have the right to tell us where we should and shouldn't live? Of course, it's more than a little difficult practically, not to mention against the interest of many people in some countries, which is why it isn't done that way any more.
They'll spend at least a week trying to find and set up desks, obtain computers, work out how everything works in the office, set up their development environments, go through 'if there's a fire walk out of the door' training and so on. That's assuming they're not spending all their time urgently finding a new home, new schools and movers (or just a new job).
Then they'll spend another week or two being really pissed off at the disruption. People generally do get pissed off at change, but it's worse if you're suddenly finding your working day is two hours longer with no extra pay because you have to trudge back and forth to the office (which always feels the worst at first). That'll be worse for some than others because of different distances and because no doubt some will be using extra time and flexibility to drive children to school or nursery. Then they'll be pissed off at having to use work computers which aren't set how they like them, don't have the extra monitor, don't have the special keyboard/mouse they find more comfortable, have an cheap uncomfortable chair they didn't choose carefully for themselves. And, of course, they'll be pissed off at the sudden noise and annoyance that kills developer productivity in offices.
People get used to those things - although quality of life will no doubt be persistently lower, and people don't really get used to increased noise. I can't help thinking that some will have reduced working hours because there just aren't enough hours in the day any more, and that some will be looking for a better deal with other employers.
Working in an office has some advantages, of course....but even if it works perfectly there's going to be a big one-off cost, as well as a bunch of ongoing disadvantages.
I suspect there's more to it than that. Every now and then, after some sort of crisis, companies do actually give it a try anyway and fail. And it isn't even all that expensive to take many neglected security measures. Instead, I think that you have to look at the goals of people involved, and what does and doesn't give them a sense of achievement. Managers want to push through their latest project, developers want to finish good quality software with some neat new design, salesman want to close the next deal, and so on. Not just management recognition, but personal satisfaction comes from doing those things, and not from doing them securely. Security is a distraction and barrier between them and what they want to achieve, not something to be proud of.
If you believe Bitcoins to be a Jolly Good Thing, you could also consider the benefits imposed on society and not just his private gains. Central banks spend more on creating some forms of cash than they're worth, but it may still be socially useful because the benefit to the whole economy is all of the economic activity enabled by having a means of exchange etc., and not its face value. It'd have to be rather astonishing to reach $561,000, though - not to mention that theft needs to be discouraged and punished anyway.
I think that might be a bit simplistic....apart from anything else, you'd have to ask 'why should they care so much about that?'. The reasons suggested for why religion exists and is held so strongly are quite numerous, and I'd expect quite a few to be true. For example:
Religion is evolutionarily useful to humans because it helps a group perform acts of high altruism towards each other without becoming unable to perform acts of extreme warfare on the tribe next door with different beliefs. If you think of anything which becomes hotly debated like evolution vs creationism as a potential group marker, you could consider a battle over it in schools to be a battle over a child's group affiliation.
Religions are like mind-viruses that exploit human mental weaknesses, and the successful ones have evolved to do this better than others. One way to be successful is to co-opt humans' moral sense and transmission mechanism. Humans have an urge to transmit their codes of morality, especially to children, and so religions (like Christianity) which make their followers believe that belief is morally good will produce believers who honestly and fervently try very hard to push an environment on children which will make them believe the same. And, of course, morality involves emotions like disgust and admiration that don't disappear just because you realize they're illogical.
Religions were invented as ways to explain in the absence of a better method: to explain how the world is how it is, and also to explain why we have moral feelings. But as it's passed down generations the religious then take it as a reliable source of knowledge and so a challenge to this method of knowledge gathering becomes a challenge to the validity of morality (as they see it).
Religion comes from detecting agency where there is none. When humans see something happening/moving/whatever it's safer to assume something is behind it (like a predator) and run, and so humans are biased towards this. Apply this to trees falling, storms happening, floods, and build from there. So this plays to people's fears that there's something huge and dangerous there you don't want to annoy or challenge. Saying 'you didn't do all this!' in the face of a perceived claim of the opposite is quite a big challenge.
Mm. I can't help thinking that it's dangerous to do what he did without a great deal of care. Not because being away from social media on an iThing for a while isn't perfectly fine, but because of the risk of parents trying to impose their own personality traits on their children. I didn't spend my pre-iThing youth outside kicking a ball around, I spent it indoors reading books, learning to play the piano, experimenting with amateur electronics and learning to program a BBC B. Parents who think their children should be an extrovert when they're not, or should be sporty when they're not, or should be intellectual bookish types when they're not, or who try to force their own childhood on them, could just be holding back their children from exploring something which could be important and enriching for them.
PCI DSS is a contractual requirement and not a regulatory requirement or a law. Card data thieves of all kinds aren't under any legal obligation to follow it because they haven't signed any contracts requiring it. Unless, of course, you think the NSA has a merchant account.
Of course it's not a good thing! Look around you at how many things there are worth doing with your life. Even if the basic dreary parts of production could be automated, there's no shortage of stuff out there to engage in - from the social, family and exploratory (travel the world, anyone?) to the intellectual (learning, research and the arts).
The problem with it is not that it's physically impossible for everyone to live a happy life that way, but that it's socially and economically impossible. The way our society and economy works just can't cope with distributing that output well in those circumstances. At the moment the need for labour acts as a way to force that distribution, but imagine if controlling capital (the automated machines) were the only way to receive anything above a minimum politically acceptable income.
A good example are the oil rich economies. There's enough oil money in some gulf states that no citizen really needs to do much useful work...but distribution of consumption becomes about political power and your position in society.
To deal with it well we'd need a way to distribute ownership of the robotics properly - and keep it distributed properly - without destroying the incentives every economy needs to generate to organize it's production and consumption effectively. That's hard.
Don't assume that this means they're just like any other bank in your country, though (unless, I suppose, you're in Luxembourg). For example, PayPal are not legally required to submit to UK banking ombudsman decisions (but, AIUI, they've voluntarily agreed to). If you get in to a dispute you're always going to be better off with a proper bank which is locally regulated, required to follow ALL of those regulations not just the ones it chooses, and somewhere with rules and a jurisdiction you and your lawyers/advisers/regulators/courts are familiar with.
If you're any sort of serious business you should go to a bank and get a proper merchant account instead. For me, nothing screams 'part-time trader who normally only uses eBay' than someone accepting money only via PayPal.
Bigger multi-million turnover customer might get a better deal (but how many of those do you see accepting PayPal?), but PayPal's model seems to be to essentially very cheaply bulk 'retail' payment accounts with almost everything automated. I think that's one reason so many people have problems - do anything outside their idea of mainstream and their computer will freeze your account. And you can forget the idea of trying to talk to a human - if you do, all you'll get is one who's not much more than a voice recognition system for their computer. Having to put some actual effort in to dealing with someone properly seems to be just too expensive for their model.....easier to just go with the flawed computer risk model, shut someone out, and make your money from the next person.
There isn't anything shameful about being HIV positive or legal forms of pervert (and some illegal ones, depending on where you live) either. All of these groups are widely discriminated against, though :( You probably don't want your insurance company, prospective employer or the policeman accusing you of speeding to know.
And in the UK the public debate is all about political positioning and projecting an image to the electorate. At the moment it's about whether they should 'teach values' and about whether parents, charities, etc. should be able to set up new taxpayer funded schools in areas with enough places. In the past team sports have been promoted, streaming and not streaming have, faith-based schools have, and so on. It's always about political symbolism, not education.
Umm.....so someone uses an ETag legitimately on their dynamic site, and you respond by DDoSing them? That's sort of the problem.....you have no idea if they're tracking you or not, and a great deal of wanted legitimate content will come with ETags.
They ARE taking legal action: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23764632