And any hacker who stumbles across it could get very rich by selling it to some state agency. Granted, they might have to hope said agency doesn't pay them and then have them "disappear", but it's not like these people operate completely within the law to begin with.
It sounds like they want encryption with a backdoor for law enforcement to get into with a warrant. Even putting aside the abuse of power that would happen (e.g. government getting a rubber stamped warrant to look at someone's phone because they don't like his political views), this is worrying. There is no such thing as "a backdoor only for law enforcement." If you make a backdoor, hackers and other governments WILL find it and WILL exploit it. Unlike a normal vulnerability, which can be patched when found, if this backdoor gets out it won't be able to be patched. The government agencies will demand that it remains open for them even while other entities abuse it.
"Law enforcement only" backdoors will just make security much weaker for everyone while not really improving much in the way of security on the law enforcement side.
Not to mention some of the other disgusting things that a person could do if they are alone in another person's house. Especially if it's a guy delivering something to a house a woman lives in.
Years ago, I was making a website for a company that shall remain nameless. They wanted an online ordering system built. No problem. I can do that. Then, they told me they wanted the order information to not be saved into a database, but e-mailed to them. I pushed back as much as I could, but finally had to build it for them. (It's complicated as to why I couldn't just say "I refuse" and walk away. Trust me, had it been up to me, I would have.)
A few years later, they came to me saying they had a complaint from a user who discovered that their full credit card information was being e-mailed insecurely. In my head, I shouted "I TOLD YOU SO" while outwardly I pitched a database-based system that they finally agreed to.
Exactly this. Many 2nd amendment proponents see themselves engaging in a standoff against an overreaching federal government and driving them back. However, if the federal government ever got to that point and had the backing of the US military, all of their guns wouldn't be worth squat against armed and trained US soldiers. Not that I think this is going to come to pass anytime in the near future, but the "we'll take on the US military with our guns and win" mentality is wrong.
That's why you keep your populace uneducated but distracted ("bread and circuses") so that they never get to be dangerous. And if they ever start heading down the "dangerous" path, you either clamp down on them (a few key arrests, ideally discrediting the growing movement) or you give in with some meaningless concession ("I know you feel overtaxed so every citizen now gets free HBO for three months!").
My kids recently re-discovered Dinosaurs on Hulu. They just watched the "WAR" episodes where the media only reports what the government approves to be reported. If this goes through, expect a similar thing to happen. News won't be able to report on arguments against X because the government is in favor of X and has deemed all arguments against X to be "terrorist content."
It also could allow politicians to ban a subject by deeming it terrorist content. "You think you have a right to look at information on birth control? Well, that could be used by terrorists so we've classified all birth control information as 'terrorist content.' You are now under arrest for viewing terrorist content."
If we could have a sensible discussion where guns are not elevated above all other utensils, we might get to the bottom of this.
Which is why the CDC must be allowed to study the issue. Currently, they are prevented from doing so which results in both sides shouting rhetoric and circumstantial evidence back and forth. We need to study the issue and get some hard facts on what we could do to curtail the epidemic of gun violence with minimal impact on law abiding gun owners.
How about this, then? Allow the CDC to study gun violence in the US? Currently, they are prevented from doing so. This leads to any gun control legislation being well intentioned but reactionary at best. If the CDC were allowed to study the issue and issue a report, that could be used to craft gun control laws that wouldn't impact the vast majority of law abiding gun owners while decreasing the incidence of mass shootings like these. Or the report might show that no amount of gun control law would solve this, in which case, we could move on to other possible solutions.
To use your Equifax example, we don't just shout "Put up more firewalls" if a company is hacked. We examine how the hack occurred. Did software not get patched? Did employees fall for phishing scams? Was a laptop with passwords left in an employee's car? Once we figure out how the hack happened, we can take measures to prevent future hacks. In fact, oftentimes companies will pay people to "hack" into their systems. These intrusion detection companies will find the holes in your computer defenses so you can address them before a hacker exploits them just as the CDC could find the "holes" that are allowing mass shootings to happen so that we can fix it.
What if anytime someone learns the truth, they are just 'reset' to not believe in simulations? I'm convinced now, more than ever, that we're actually living within a simula.... BZZZZZTTT... and that's why there's no possible way we live in a simulation!
Net Neutrality isn't "e-mails are slightly delayed so video packets can be delivered faster." It's "video packets from Netflix are slowed down because they compete against us and refused to pay us extra for timely delivery of their packets."
ISPs in many areas are monopolies or duopolies for Internet services. They are seeing competition for their video services, however, so they use their Internet monopoly/duopoly to punish any competitors and prop up their video services. Net Neutrality says that you have to treat all data of the same type the same regardless of where it's from. You can't slow down an e-mail from X provider while making Y provider's e-mails go quickly. You can't slow down Netflix because you want your own video service to seem quicker.
There should be market for our personal details. There should be no one interested in knowing our social security number or our dates of birth or our mothers' maiden names. Why is there a market for it? Why is it so valuable to criminals?
When my identity was stolen, the criminals opened up a Capital One card in my name using a web application form. They had my name, address, SSN, and date of birth. What they didn't have was my mother's maiden name. They put down something that wasn't even close to being right. Capital One approved the card anyway. So much for mother's maiden name being a "security question."
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if they sold access to your credit information (as they often do) and included your e-mail address in the mix. Then some company just has to hire a shady "e-mail marketing" company and your e-mail address is on a spammer list.
4. The criminals who steal the personally identifying information rarely use it. It's too risky. Instead, they'll offer it on various black market sites to other people. So while the hackers might have 100 million+ identities to offer, they might be slowly releasing them for sale and the buyers might be taking their time using them. It's not like the hackers will suddenly open up 100 million credit cards under 100 million people's names.
Reminder this is the same Wordpress that believes they own the copyright on any template that works with Wordpress, even if it was written from scratch and doesn't contain any derivative works.
Do you have a source for WordPress claiming copyright ownership of all themes? I've used WordPress quite extensively and have never heard of this.
And what's WordPress planning anyways, suing Facebook for patent infringement sometime down the road?
They're protecting their users. Suppose WordPress kept using ReactJS and I used WordPress. Now, I decide to sue Facebook for violating some patent of mine. Due to Facebook's licensing, I'd lose my license to use ReactJS and, thus, wouldn't be able to use WordPress. All WordPress-based sites of mine would immediately need to come down lest Facebook sue me back. It's a method of suppressing patent infringement lawsuits. By WordPress switching from ReactJS to an alternative, they protect their users from this.
Governments care slightly because upset voters can mean politicians get kicked out. By contrast, Equifax doesn't care at all because we're just data points to them and whether we're happy or upset data points doesn't matter at all. Government regulation might not be perfect, but it's better than just letting Equifax do whatever it wants and assuming that "the market will sort it out."
No, it was Epil-Stop. The product claimed to remove hair painlessly. Some users reported chemical burns. The stories all seemed similar. "I put it on, felt a burning sensation that got painful, tried to wash it off and it got worse." One person sent me photos of their burns. I looked up information on the products' ingredients on various sites that track chemical properties. Some of the chemicals in Epil-Stop said they reacted with water. So, of course, trying to wash the product off your skin would cause a chemical reaction which would lead to worse burns.
(Disclaimer: This was over a decade ago. For all I know, Epil-Stop reformulated their product to avoid these issues. I'd still be leery of a product that claims you just apply it and wipe hair away painlessly.)
I keep track of the number of words only because I'm a numbers geek and like to know this stuff. My story is done when it's done, not when it hits a certain number of words.
Definitely. I didn't write mine thinking I'd get on the best seller list. (Not that I didn't engage in some imaginings of what that'd be like, but it was a "If I won the lottery, what would I do" sort of thing.) I wrote it because I like writing and wanted to publish a book. Personally, if my book makes back what I spent during the publishing process (about $300), then I'll consider it a success. Meanwhile, I'm writing my second book and have an idea for a kids book that I want to write with my 10 year old son who absolutely loves writing stories. (He seems to have inherited my drive to tell tales and inspired me to get back into writing.)
It's self-published so I don't need to worry about what the publisher wants. The 80,000 word thing is my own personal target, but if there's one lesson I learned from my first book, it's that the book will be as long as the book wants to be. My first book started out as a short story to ease me back into writing after a self-imposed hiatus. It turned into an over 64,000 word novel that's the first book in a trilogy.
I haven't been doing much reading because I've been hard at work writing a book. It's a sequel to my first novel (Ghost Thief if you don't mind a shameless plug). I'm currently over 72,000 words on the sequel and there's probably another 8,000 words (at least) until I hit the end.
The only thing people like this care about is money. If they can take an illegal action that nets them $1 billion and, if caught, pay a $1 million fine, they'll do it. If they can, they might even do it first and use some of the money to paying off... I mean lobbying politicians to make the action legal (or, at least, hard to prosecute).
Something along the lines of an Equifax breach should mean that the executives in charge of the company are fined 10 years' worth of their compensation package (including, but not limited to, stock options and salary). Maybe if a decade's worth of their valuation goes up in smoke, they'd get the hint.
One of the first sites I ran was an infomercial product review website. One of the lessons I got out of that site was that people tended to review products if they really hated them or if they really liked them - with the former outweighing the latter. People don't tend to post reviews for "it was a decent product that fit my need, but there was nothing exceptional about it." So you will often get a bunch of 1 star reviews on what might be a decent product or 5 star reviews on what might be a so-so product. (Then again, I got some truly dreadful product reviews - including photos of bodily damage caused by one particular product that, when I last checked, was still on the market.)
Going back to movies, if 1,000 people watch a movie, you might get a dozen "man, that was awful" reviews even if 900 people sort of liked it, but not enough to make the effort to post a review.
Slashdot Mirror
And any hacker who stumbles across it could get very rich by selling it to some state agency. Granted, they might have to hope said agency doesn't pay them and then have them "disappear", but it's not like these people operate completely within the law to begin with.
It sounds like they want encryption with a backdoor for law enforcement to get into with a warrant. Even putting aside the abuse of power that would happen (e.g. government getting a rubber stamped warrant to look at someone's phone because they don't like his political views), this is worrying. There is no such thing as "a backdoor only for law enforcement." If you make a backdoor, hackers and other governments WILL find it and WILL exploit it. Unlike a normal vulnerability, which can be patched when found, if this backdoor gets out it won't be able to be patched. The government agencies will demand that it remains open for them even while other entities abuse it.
"Law enforcement only" backdoors will just make security much weaker for everyone while not really improving much in the way of security on the law enforcement side.
Not to mention some of the other disgusting things that a person could do if they are alone in another person's house. Especially if it's a guy delivering something to a house a woman lives in.
Years ago, I was making a website for a company that shall remain nameless. They wanted an online ordering system built. No problem. I can do that. Then, they told me they wanted the order information to not be saved into a database, but e-mailed to them. I pushed back as much as I could, but finally had to build it for them. (It's complicated as to why I couldn't just say "I refuse" and walk away. Trust me, had it been up to me, I would have.)
A few years later, they came to me saying they had a complaint from a user who discovered that their full credit card information was being e-mailed insecurely. In my head, I shouted "I TOLD YOU SO" while outwardly I pitched a database-based system that they finally agreed to.
Exactly this. Many 2nd amendment proponents see themselves engaging in a standoff against an overreaching federal government and driving them back. However, if the federal government ever got to that point and had the backing of the US military, all of their guns wouldn't be worth squat against armed and trained US soldiers. Not that I think this is going to come to pass anytime in the near future, but the "we'll take on the US military with our guns and win" mentality is wrong.
That's why you keep your populace uneducated but distracted ("bread and circuses") so that they never get to be dangerous. And if they ever start heading down the "dangerous" path, you either clamp down on them (a few key arrests, ideally discrediting the growing movement) or you give in with some meaningless concession ("I know you feel overtaxed so every citizen now gets free HBO for three months!").
My kids recently re-discovered Dinosaurs on Hulu. They just watched the "WAR" episodes where the media only reports what the government approves to be reported. If this goes through, expect a similar thing to happen. News won't be able to report on arguments against X because the government is in favor of X and has deemed all arguments against X to be "terrorist content."
It also could allow politicians to ban a subject by deeming it terrorist content. "You think you have a right to look at information on birth control? Well, that could be used by terrorists so we've classified all birth control information as 'terrorist content.' You are now under arrest for viewing terrorist content."
Which is why the CDC must be allowed to study the issue. Currently, they are prevented from doing so which results in both sides shouting rhetoric and circumstantial evidence back and forth. We need to study the issue and get some hard facts on what we could do to curtail the epidemic of gun violence with minimal impact on law abiding gun owners.
How about this, then? Allow the CDC to study gun violence in the US? Currently, they are prevented from doing so. This leads to any gun control legislation being well intentioned but reactionary at best. If the CDC were allowed to study the issue and issue a report, that could be used to craft gun control laws that wouldn't impact the vast majority of law abiding gun owners while decreasing the incidence of mass shootings like these. Or the report might show that no amount of gun control law would solve this, in which case, we could move on to other possible solutions.
To use your Equifax example, we don't just shout "Put up more firewalls" if a company is hacked. We examine how the hack occurred. Did software not get patched? Did employees fall for phishing scams? Was a laptop with passwords left in an employee's car? Once we figure out how the hack happened, we can take measures to prevent future hacks. In fact, oftentimes companies will pay people to "hack" into their systems. These intrusion detection companies will find the holes in your computer defenses so you can address them before a hacker exploits them just as the CDC could find the "holes" that are allowing mass shootings to happen so that we can fix it.
What if anytime someone learns the truth, they are just 'reset' to not believe in simulations? I'm convinced now, more than ever, that we're actually living within a simula.... BZZZZZTTT ... and that's why there's no possible way we live in a simulation!
Net Neutrality isn't "e-mails are slightly delayed so video packets can be delivered faster." It's "video packets from Netflix are slowed down because they compete against us and refused to pay us extra for timely delivery of their packets."
ISPs in many areas are monopolies or duopolies for Internet services. They are seeing competition for their video services, however, so they use their Internet monopoly/duopoly to punish any competitors and prop up their video services. Net Neutrality says that you have to treat all data of the same type the same regardless of where it's from. You can't slow down an e-mail from X provider while making Y provider's e-mails go quickly. You can't slow down Netflix because you want your own video service to seem quicker.
When my identity was stolen, the criminals opened up a Capital One card in my name using a web application form. They had my name, address, SSN, and date of birth. What they didn't have was my mother's maiden name. They put down something that wasn't even close to being right. Capital One approved the card anyway. So much for mother's maiden name being a "security question."
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if they sold access to your credit information (as they often do) and included your e-mail address in the mix. Then some company just has to hire a shady "e-mail marketing" company and your e-mail address is on a spammer list.
I'd also add:
4. The criminals who steal the personally identifying information rarely use it. It's too risky. Instead, they'll offer it on various black market sites to other people. So while the hackers might have 100 million+ identities to offer, they might be slowly releasing them for sale and the buyers might be taking their time using them. It's not like the hackers will suddenly open up 100 million credit cards under 100 million people's names.
Do you have a source for WordPress claiming copyright ownership of all themes? I've used WordPress quite extensively and have never heard of this.
They're protecting their users. Suppose WordPress kept using ReactJS and I used WordPress. Now, I decide to sue Facebook for violating some patent of mine. Due to Facebook's licensing, I'd lose my license to use ReactJS and, thus, wouldn't be able to use WordPress. All WordPress-based sites of mine would immediately need to come down lest Facebook sue me back. It's a method of suppressing patent infringement lawsuits. By WordPress switching from ReactJS to an alternative, they protect their users from this.
Governments care slightly because upset voters can mean politicians get kicked out. By contrast, Equifax doesn't care at all because we're just data points to them and whether we're happy or upset data points doesn't matter at all. Government regulation might not be perfect, but it's better than just letting Equifax do whatever it wants and assuming that "the market will sort it out."
No, it was Epil-Stop. The product claimed to remove hair painlessly. Some users reported chemical burns. The stories all seemed similar. "I put it on, felt a burning sensation that got painful, tried to wash it off and it got worse." One person sent me photos of their burns. I looked up information on the products' ingredients on various sites that track chemical properties. Some of the chemicals in Epil-Stop said they reacted with water. So, of course, trying to wash the product off your skin would cause a chemical reaction which would lead to worse burns.
(Disclaimer: This was over a decade ago. For all I know, Epil-Stop reformulated their product to avoid these issues. I'd still be leery of a product that claims you just apply it and wipe hair away painlessly.)
I keep track of the number of words only because I'm a numbers geek and like to know this stuff. My story is done when it's done, not when it hits a certain number of words.
Definitely. I didn't write mine thinking I'd get on the best seller list. (Not that I didn't engage in some imaginings of what that'd be like, but it was a "If I won the lottery, what would I do" sort of thing.) I wrote it because I like writing and wanted to publish a book. Personally, if my book makes back what I spent during the publishing process (about $300), then I'll consider it a success. Meanwhile, I'm writing my second book and have an idea for a kids book that I want to write with my 10 year old son who absolutely loves writing stories. (He seems to have inherited my drive to tell tales and inspired me to get back into writing.)
Thanks. Let me know what you think of it - even if you don't go past the free sample.
It's self-published so I don't need to worry about what the publisher wants. The 80,000 word thing is my own personal target, but if there's one lesson I learned from my first book, it's that the book will be as long as the book wants to be. My first book started out as a short story to ease me back into writing after a self-imposed hiatus. It turned into an over 64,000 word novel that's the first book in a trilogy.
I haven't been doing much reading because I've been hard at work writing a book. It's a sequel to my first novel (Ghost Thief if you don't mind a shameless plug). I'm currently over 72,000 words on the sequel and there's probably another 8,000 words (at least) until I hit the end.
The only thing people like this care about is money. If they can take an illegal action that nets them $1 billion and, if caught, pay a $1 million fine, they'll do it. If they can, they might even do it first and use some of the money to paying off... I mean lobbying politicians to make the action legal (or, at least, hard to prosecute).
Something along the lines of an Equifax breach should mean that the executives in charge of the company are fined 10 years' worth of their compensation package (including, but not limited to, stock options and salary). Maybe if a decade's worth of their valuation goes up in smoke, they'd get the hint.
One of the first sites I ran was an infomercial product review website. One of the lessons I got out of that site was that people tended to review products if they really hated them or if they really liked them - with the former outweighing the latter. People don't tend to post reviews for "it was a decent product that fit my need, but there was nothing exceptional about it." So you will often get a bunch of 1 star reviews on what might be a decent product or 5 star reviews on what might be a so-so product. (Then again, I got some truly dreadful product reviews - including photos of bodily damage caused by one particular product that, when I last checked, was still on the market.)
Going back to movies, if 1,000 people watch a movie, you might get a dozen "man, that was awful" reviews even if 900 people sort of liked it, but not enough to make the effort to post a review.