I'm with you. I took a couple of hours and literally, manually deleted 99% of the stuff I've done on Facebook, and have stopped using it. (Yes, I realize that the company has this stuff forever, but I've learned my lesson.)
The problem is that "free" will always win. Always. People, in general, are willing to trade anything for "free." The few, vocal persons who are not (willing) will always be inconsequential in these matters.
First, Wordpress is GPL software, so you can't lump it in with Flickr, et. al. (I just converted my personal site from a custom Rails app to Wordpress.)
Second, what I haven't seen anyone remark about in this thread so far is RSS feeds. If people create their own sites, put whatever content and restrictions they would like on them, and then make different feeds for different groups of people, those people can aggregate what they want with a good feed reader, and everyone's happy!
... I've never had to revert to a reinstall. Typically, I also find it unproductive, as you don't learn anything. Even if it's a bastard to track down the issue, you learn a lot from the experience, and that will help you solve the same or similar problems in the future. Reinstalling any operating system is a very blunt approach.
Whatever. I just did my umpteenth virus cleanup on a friend's computer. It took me 6 hours of fooling around with it (off and on) to get it cleaned up. As I didn't know the user's password, I had hacked the Administrator account, and used that one for the exercise. Turns out the virus had some stuff still stuck in the user's profile, and reinfected the machine when she started using it again.
So I'm done with trying to "clean" a PC with one of these newfangled super-virus/rootkit/remote-spam-server/fake-antivirus infections. The next time someone comes to me with a virus-infected PC, I'm going to get their data off, scan it with a couple of online virus checkers, wipe and reinstall their machine, and put their data back on. I could be done in a couple of hours.
Unfortunately, that's probably too much work as well, considering how few people keep their reinstall disks. If they haven't, it would be a reboot-fest of installing service packs, drivers, updates, and software. Bleh! Is this the best you can do, Microsoft? Really?!
Maybe next time, I'll just tell them to sell the PC on eBay and buy a Mac. (I'll even wipe the disk for them!) Will it solve everything? No, and spare me the usual rhetoric. The bottom line is that they'll be better off.
Where I work, a dismissed employee refused to tell us what a password was. Legal action was threatened by the owner, who claimed it was theft: denying someone of something they owned. My father-in-law is a lawyer, and I asked him about that. He said that refusing to give your employer a password would be classified as "illegal control" (or something close to that), not "theft." Apparently, the laws would be less severe for this. In the end, we just worked around the problem.
I researched long and hard before I bought my iPhone a couple months ago. I had been using some form of Palm device for about 15 years; the last two of which were a model of Treo. The bottom line is that I needed NON-EXCHANGE-TYPE access to calendars on mail servers. Specifically, I have a Zimbra FOSS mail server for my family, and a Zimbra NE server at work (which handles 2 companies). I didn't want either server to be "canonical," so I refuse to use ActiveSync and let it "take over" all of the PIM functions of the phone. For calendars, I use CalDAV, and the iPhone has KILLER CalDAV support. (I use a Funambol server at home to sync contacts, and the Zindus plugin to make them work with Thunderbird, though SyncEvolution works almost as well with Evoltion.)
Neither the new WebOS-based Palm phones, nor any of the Android phones I can find, have any support for CalDAV. At all. How this situation exists, I have no idea, but I don't care. The iPhone has been great. However, I am one of those people who has used Linux on the desktop for about 11 years now, and I'm watching and waiting for an Android phone that will integrate with my collaboration servers as well as an iPhone. When this happens, I'll give the iPhone to my wife. Heck, I'd pay an early-termination fee to switch providers if the Sprint Evo could do it!
He's a well-above-average-skill-level hacker. Maybe one of the best. To me, this qualifies him to comment on anything that's a non-trivial coding exercise, and anything around it. News for nerds, and all that.
I and my employer have been long-time Gentoo fans. We've recently switched almost everything over to Ubuntu. Also, I've just installed Zimbra at home. Because it's looking good, I am also in the process of installing it at work. I am already convinced that Ubuntu is in good hands, and Matt's appointment only strengthens this impression. What I'm concerned about is what's going to happen to Zimbra under VMware. I'm working on my management about buying the full-featured version for our Blackberry-using salesman, but please tell me that the current free version will continue to be loved.
As a 4-year veteran of running many Gentoo machines, who is still in the tenative stages of switching to Ubuntu (and who could never quite get the hang of compiling custom kernels successfully), I found this very funny. Thanks for more ammo to make the switch.
That sounds nice, and all, but I call bullshit. First, if they were contractually obligated to keep their raw data secret, they could simply say so, instead of just stonewalling FOI requests. Feel free to post copies of the contracts and prove your assertion. Second, if they had the evidence -- the raw data -- that would shut the mouths of "deniers" once and for all, they'd release it in a heartbeat for the very reason you cite that they don't.
The bottom line is that the fact that we still don't have the raw data sets WEEKS after this story broke is damning. Either they don't have it, or they know that it doesn't show what they SAY it shows and are simply trying to avoid exposure, or they are cooking the books (some more?) to support their theories before releasing it. There's absolutely no excuse to not just simply but EVERYTHING on the table at this point, and let EVERYONE, professionals and "amateurs" alike, have at it.
MonkeyGTD gets me through.Obviously, it's a GTD-based app, but that boils down to simple lists. What made this particular app appealing to me was that it handled hierarchical projects (lists) very well. It doesn't support deadlines very well, but that's not part of the GTD methodology. There are other TiddlyWiki-based project management apps, some of which integrate a calendar, if that's important to you. There are separate "areas" for work, personal, etc. parts of your life. When I'm at work, I just keep the "work" realm selected. When I get home, I can switch it off, and turn the others on. It's just a single HTML file, if that suits you, but there are a couple methods to host it. You can set one up at TiddlySpot, or do what I do, and set it up on a local web server with a TiddlyWiki plugin for saving. There's also a wonderfully-helpful mailing list supporting GTD-based Tiddly apps, where hacks are discussed to customize the file to your needs.
There are 442 comments on this article at the time I write this, and no one has written the word, "Bilski." All I want to know is whether that case could impact this one. Is it possible that this case could finally force the courts to say that it's not possible to patent software at all?
That's a good question. The followup that occurs to me is: if law enforcement is so bored or desperate for a win that they have to stoop to hanging a guy (who actually, really is just guilty of an accident which he took care of), then will they stop if they don't find deleted, incriminating files? Will they then rely solely on their logs, which they will claim to a jury proves everything? And then claim that the fact that they couldn't find ANY deleted files is proof that he's hiding his illegal activities in such a nefarious way that their "cybercrime experts" can't even trace it?
What this speaks -- loudly and clearly -- to me is that the national tapping of any and all communication lines is complete. And, when things are slow and the FBI can't find a terrorist cell or -power group to take down, they troll their logs, and look to hang someone that no one would defend.
I'm sure that both the EFF and the ACLU will jump in here any minute now...
It just makes the case for using cryptography in everything you do online. I don't know how far it goes though. It may be that they finally laid off Zimmerman because they have enough horsepower to break anything that bubbles up to the surface as potentially interesting.
The only way to get different outfits in the game is to buy them. Nearly everyone but myself seems to do this. I guess they weren't making enough with that approach. Maybe you should need to rent your clothes?
I've bought into the game a little, and came to realize some things. The bottom line is that you would spend A LOT more money on this game than just buying one off the shelf in order to make it fun. It's not a situation where spending $20 is the end of it. The really nice stuff (like bandages and wrenches) can make you really hard to beat, but you'll be spending $50 A MONTH keeping up with that if you play regularly. I get the feeling that the people who are "the best" at the game are kids with rich parents who let them have access to a credit card.
Disclaimer: I left the game quite quite awhile ago when they "rebalanced" the classes. I tried it a little while when the "rebalanced" the "rebalance," and that's when I realized that they had already shifted the pricing structure to the point that I didn't care to invest any more. Looks like I don't need to check back in any more. Whatev! Just less jerks to have to deal with. I can get my annoyance on with BF2 or 2142 just as well, but I've earned all the gear in 2142. (I don't think I'll ever get the last 2 weapons in BF2.)
3) The out-of-the-box remote admin abilities of Windows are excellent. (At least...as good as they are for Linux. Considering that both have a firewall by default, which you have to get the user to turn off in order to be able to remote admin the box...)
I don't know what planet you hail from, stranger, but I hope you have nice weather there.
Seriously. Saying that remote-admin capabilities on Windows are "at least" as good as they are for Linux is ridiculous, even if done in a joking way, because jokes work only if they have some basis in reality.
Government -- local, state, and federal -- have poured what I can only assume are billions of dollars, at this point, of bungled aid into the reconstruction of this area. Now, we're going to hold the government liable for the problem in the first place, opening the door for all sorts of civil litigation that will get rounded up as class action lawsuits, which will do 2 things. First, it will still leave people scratching their heads on how to get some money to rebuild. Secondly, it's time for all literally hundreds lawyers to get theirs.
Clipperz is both a service, and a downloadable webapp you can run on your own server. It's the closest thing I've found that approximates the features of 1Pass (for Macs) on Linux. Now I just need to get a data plan for my phone.
Wow. Like the government needs Google to know any of this. Unless you were mis-modded (and should have been marked funny), I've got some news: The government not only knows every place you've been on the internet, they also know the content of all your email and chats. And don't think that SSL will fool them. Your only hope of obfuscating what you're doing on the internet is STRONG encryption. Rest assured that there's nothing interesting about my life from a law-enforcement perspective, but it still bothers me. Of all of my computer-savvy friends, I know maybe 2 that would be able to successfully communicate with me with public-key encryption.
When I finally found the page that talked about web history, it said I needed to install the Google Toolbar. Yeah, no. I read the disclaimers about what they're allowed to do with the stuff it finds on my computer.
Lowes. I can't stand the light they give off, so I only use them on the outside garage fixtures that our neighborhood covenant requires that I leave on all night. (They're on a light-sensing switch.) Despite the promises, they manage to only last about a year or two. While this is dreadfully short of their supposed life, it's a lot longer than the couple of months that conventials were lasting in the same fixtures, which is why I switched. I guess external applications don't count.
Yes. What strikes me most about this situation is that -- no matter how bad the fall -- the average corporate officer will find another company willing to take them on in another, privileged position. My ex-boss -- a "sociopath" if ever there was one -- knew this and even commented on it. It was his singular goal in life to make it into "the club," because, once you're in, you're in for life. If one company doesn't work out, you've got the "street cred" to just go somewhere else.
Sadly, I think he was SO good at being a sociopath (he consistently worked ungodly hours and got enormous work done) that I think the executives would have to be outright brain dead to promote him. At the end of the day, I think he became a "loser" in the middle-management role. Of course, I could be wrong; he's still there, and he still may break into the upper ranks.
There are some good insights in the article, but something about it seems off. It could use some work to tighten it up. OTOH, I just don't care any more. I've moved on from HugeCo life, and things are much more explicit and visceral in a startup. If you don't produce, you're gone. There's not much call for introspective philosophy for me now.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you. I took a couple of hours and literally, manually deleted 99% of the stuff I've done on Facebook, and have stopped using it. (Yes, I realize that the company has this stuff forever, but I've learned my lesson.)
The problem is that "free" will always win. Always. People, in general, are willing to trade anything for "free." The few, vocal persons who are not (willing) will always be inconsequential in these matters.
First, Wordpress is GPL software, so you can't lump it in with Flickr, et. al. (I just converted my personal site from a custom Rails app to Wordpress.)
Second, what I haven't seen anyone remark about in this thread so far is RSS feeds. If people create their own sites, put whatever content and restrictions they would like on them, and then make different feeds for different groups of people, those people can aggregate what they want with a good feed reader, and everyone's happy!
But, yeah, that's a lot more work.
I've been using Windows software for 14 years, and I have NEVER had to do a full system reinstall.
You must have been using it with a VERY low duty cycle.
I keed, I keed.
... I've never had to revert to a reinstall. Typically, I also find it unproductive, as you don't learn anything. Even if it's a bastard to track down the issue, you learn a lot from the experience, and that will help you solve the same or similar problems in the future. Reinstalling any operating system is a very blunt approach.
Whatever. I just did my umpteenth virus cleanup on a friend's computer. It took me 6 hours of fooling around with it (off and on) to get it cleaned up. As I didn't know the user's password, I had hacked the Administrator account, and used that one for the exercise. Turns out the virus had some stuff still stuck in the user's profile, and reinfected the machine when she started using it again.
So I'm done with trying to "clean" a PC with one of these newfangled super-virus/rootkit/remote-spam-server/fake-antivirus infections. The next time someone comes to me with a virus-infected PC, I'm going to get their data off, scan it with a couple of online virus checkers, wipe and reinstall their machine, and put their data back on. I could be done in a couple of hours.
Unfortunately, that's probably too much work as well, considering how few people keep their reinstall disks. If they haven't, it would be a reboot-fest of installing service packs, drivers, updates, and software. Bleh! Is this the best you can do, Microsoft? Really?!
Maybe next time, I'll just tell them to sell the PC on eBay and buy a Mac. (I'll even wipe the disk for them!) Will it solve everything? No, and spare me the usual rhetoric. The bottom line is that they'll be better off.
Where I work, a dismissed employee refused to tell us what a password was. Legal action was threatened by the owner, who claimed it was theft: denying someone of something they owned. My father-in-law is a lawyer, and I asked him about that. He said that refusing to give your employer a password would be classified as "illegal control" (or something close to that), not "theft." Apparently, the laws would be less severe for this. In the end, we just worked around the problem.
I researched long and hard before I bought my iPhone a couple months ago. I had been using some form of Palm device for about 15 years; the last two of which were a model of Treo. The bottom line is that I needed NON-EXCHANGE-TYPE access to calendars on mail servers. Specifically, I have a Zimbra FOSS mail server for my family, and a Zimbra NE server at work (which handles 2 companies). I didn't want either server to be "canonical," so I refuse to use ActiveSync and let it "take over" all of the PIM functions of the phone. For calendars, I use CalDAV, and the iPhone has KILLER CalDAV support. (I use a Funambol server at home to sync contacts, and the Zindus plugin to make them work with Thunderbird, though SyncEvolution works almost as well with Evoltion.)
Neither the new WebOS-based Palm phones, nor any of the Android phones I can find, have any support for CalDAV. At all. How this situation exists, I have no idea, but I don't care. The iPhone has been great. However, I am one of those people who has used Linux on the desktop for about 11 years now, and I'm watching and waiting for an Android phone that will integrate with my collaboration servers as well as an iPhone. When this happens, I'll give the iPhone to my wife. Heck, I'd pay an early-termination fee to switch providers if the Sprint Evo could do it!
He's a well-above-average-skill-level hacker. Maybe one of the best. To me, this qualifies him to comment on anything that's a non-trivial coding exercise, and anything around it. News for nerds, and all that.
Slashdot really needs to start supporting video. Or at least images.
I and my employer have been long-time Gentoo fans. We've recently switched almost everything over to Ubuntu. Also, I've just installed Zimbra at home. Because it's looking good, I am also in the process of installing it at work. I am already convinced that Ubuntu is in good hands, and Matt's appointment only strengthens this impression. What I'm concerned about is what's going to happen to Zimbra under VMware. I'm working on my management about buying the full-featured version for our Blackberry-using salesman, but please tell me that the current free version will continue to be loved.
As a 4-year veteran of running many Gentoo machines, who is still in the tenative stages of switching to Ubuntu (and who could never quite get the hang of compiling custom kernels successfully), I found this very funny. Thanks for more ammo to make the switch.
That sounds nice, and all, but I call bullshit. First, if they were contractually obligated to keep their raw data secret, they could simply say so, instead of just stonewalling FOI requests. Feel free to post copies of the contracts and prove your assertion. Second, if they had the evidence -- the raw data -- that would shut the mouths of "deniers" once and for all, they'd release it in a heartbeat for the very reason you cite that they don't.
The bottom line is that the fact that we still don't have the raw data sets WEEKS after this story broke is damning. Either they don't have it, or they know that it doesn't show what they SAY it shows and are simply trying to avoid exposure, or they are cooking the books (some more?) to support their theories before releasing it. There's absolutely no excuse to not just simply but EVERYTHING on the table at this point, and let EVERYONE, professionals and "amateurs" alike, have at it.
MonkeyGTD gets me through.Obviously, it's a GTD-based app, but that boils down to simple lists. What made this particular app appealing to me was that it handled hierarchical projects (lists) very well. It doesn't support deadlines very well, but that's not part of the GTD methodology. There are other TiddlyWiki-based project management apps, some of which integrate a calendar, if that's important to you. There are separate "areas" for work, personal, etc. parts of your life. When I'm at work, I just keep the "work" realm selected. When I get home, I can switch it off, and turn the others on. It's just a single HTML file, if that suits you, but there are a couple methods to host it. You can set one up at TiddlySpot, or do what I do, and set it up on a local web server with a TiddlyWiki plugin for saving. There's also a wonderfully-helpful mailing list supporting GTD-based Tiddly apps, where hacks are discussed to customize the file to your needs.
There are 442 comments on this article at the time I write this, and no one has written the word, "Bilski." All I want to know is whether that case could impact this one. Is it possible that this case could finally force the courts to say that it's not possible to patent software at all?
That's a good question. The followup that occurs to me is: if law enforcement is so bored or desperate for a win that they have to stoop to hanging a guy (who actually, really is just guilty of an accident which he took care of), then will they stop if they don't find deleted, incriminating files? Will they then rely solely on their logs, which they will claim to a jury proves everything? And then claim that the fact that they couldn't find ANY deleted files is proof that he's hiding his illegal activities in such a nefarious way that their "cybercrime experts" can't even trace it?
What this speaks -- loudly and clearly -- to me is that the national tapping of any and all communication lines is complete. And, when things are slow and the FBI can't find a terrorist cell or -power group to take down, they troll their logs, and look to hang someone that no one would defend.
I'm sure that both the EFF and the ACLU will jump in here any minute now...
It just makes the case for using cryptography in everything you do online. I don't know how far it goes though. It may be that they finally laid off Zimmerman because they have enough horsepower to break anything that bubbles up to the surface as potentially interesting.
The only way to get different outfits in the game is to buy them. Nearly everyone but myself seems to do this. I guess they weren't making enough with that approach. Maybe you should need to rent your clothes?
I've bought into the game a little, and came to realize some things. The bottom line is that you would spend A LOT more money on this game than just buying one off the shelf in order to make it fun. It's not a situation where spending $20 is the end of it. The really nice stuff (like bandages and wrenches) can make you really hard to beat, but you'll be spending $50 A MONTH keeping up with that if you play regularly. I get the feeling that the people who are "the best" at the game are kids with rich parents who let them have access to a credit card.
Disclaimer: I left the game quite quite awhile ago when they "rebalanced" the classes. I tried it a little while when the "rebalanced" the "rebalance," and that's when I realized that they had already shifted the pricing structure to the point that I didn't care to invest any more. Looks like I don't need to check back in any more. Whatev! Just less jerks to have to deal with. I can get my annoyance on with BF2 or 2142 just as well, but I've earned all the gear in 2142. (I don't think I'll ever get the last 2 weapons in BF2.)
3) The out-of-the-box remote admin abilities of Windows are excellent. (At least...as good as they are for Linux. Considering that both have a firewall by default, which you have to get the user to turn off in order to be able to remote admin the box...)
I don't know what planet you hail from, stranger, but I hope you have nice weather there.
Seriously. Saying that remote-admin capabilities on Windows are "at least" as good as they are for Linux is ridiculous, even if done in a joking way, because jokes work only if they have some basis in reality.
Came here to say this.
Government -- local, state, and federal -- have poured what I can only assume are billions of dollars, at this point, of bungled aid into the reconstruction of this area. Now, we're going to hold the government liable for the problem in the first place, opening the door for all sorts of civil litigation that will get rounded up as class action lawsuits, which will do 2 things. First, it will still leave people scratching their heads on how to get some money to rebuild. Secondly, it's time for all literally hundreds lawyers to get theirs.
Do what you're told. Look for another job.
http://www.clipperz.com/
Clipperz is both a service, and a downloadable webapp you can run on your own server. It's the closest thing I've found that approximates the features of 1Pass (for Macs) on Linux. Now I just need to get a data plan for my phone.
Wow. Like the government needs Google to know any of this. Unless you were mis-modded (and should have been marked funny), I've got some news: The government not only knows every place you've been on the internet, they also know the content of all your email and chats. And don't think that SSL will fool them. Your only hope of obfuscating what you're doing on the internet is STRONG encryption. Rest assured that there's nothing interesting about my life from a law-enforcement perspective, but it still bothers me. Of all of my computer-savvy friends, I know maybe 2 that would be able to successfully communicate with me with public-key encryption.
When I finally found the page that talked about web history, it said I needed to install the Google Toolbar. Yeah, no. I read the disclaimers about what they're allowed to do with the stuff it finds on my computer.
Lowes. I can't stand the light they give off, so I only use them on the outside garage fixtures that our neighborhood covenant requires that I leave on all night. (They're on a light-sensing switch.) Despite the promises, they manage to only last about a year or two. While this is dreadfully short of their supposed life, it's a lot longer than the couple of months that conventials were lasting in the same fixtures, which is why I switched. I guess external applications don't count.
Yes. What strikes me most about this situation is that -- no matter how bad the fall -- the average corporate officer will find another company willing to take them on in another, privileged position. My ex-boss -- a "sociopath" if ever there was one -- knew this and even commented on it. It was his singular goal in life to make it into "the club," because, once you're in, you're in for life. If one company doesn't work out, you've got the "street cred" to just go somewhere else.
Sadly, I think he was SO good at being a sociopath (he consistently worked ungodly hours and got enormous work done) that I think the executives would have to be outright brain dead to promote him. At the end of the day, I think he became a "loser" in the middle-management role. Of course, I could be wrong; he's still there, and he still may break into the upper ranks.
There are some good insights in the article, but something about it seems off. It could use some work to tighten it up. OTOH, I just don't care any more. I've moved on from HugeCo life, and things are much more explicit and visceral in a startup. If you don't produce, you're gone. There's not much call for introspective philosophy for me now.