Look, I know Stallman is a public figure who's history means some folks are already rolling their eyes before he gets a word out. But none of the comments here actually address the merit of this thing yet, or the fact that this problem exists to start with.
Regarding the post summary, let's evaluate the current situation. We have a world where media is beholden to advertisers and the public is the product. Injected with "flavor additive content" as tastes dictate, monitored, recorded and demographically categorized for convenient sale to 3rd party interests. I may sound overly dramatic but I don't think I'm exaggerating. The true customers for all ad based media are advertisers. Data aggregators then sell it all onward to corporate and nation state interests. I doubt any right thinking person would say this is a good state of affairs unless they've got vested interests in this particular food chain.
So a solution is necessary. Reading the FAQ blurbs about GNU Taller from the link given though, and as a self proclaimed monetary history and economics buff, I'm not convinced this is the best way forward.
I kind of like how they describe the difference between "sharing" which is anonymous and free as in speech and "transactions" where the income side is somehow not anonymous for businesses. This could be conducive for abolishing income taxation (an immoral action easily evaded by rich people) and moving to a pure consumption tax. Such as:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
Which I would support wholeheartedly. I don't see anything though which would stop GNU Taller from only perpetuating the income tax, which I am morally opposed to.
Lastly I see no mention of micro-payments. We need an anonymous way to issue fractional payments to content creators which doesn't require private details to set up, and which doesn't have service fees that would make arrangements like "a few cents per article" impractical. Bitcoin's upcoming micro-payment channel and side chain ideas are promising, but GNU Taller doesn't seem to touch on this. On this front GNU Taller looks like just more of the same whereby anonymity isn't a real thing: make an account at their site, accept cookies, sign in and be tracked as you use up your deposit.
To get back to the summary of this post, consider this question: Would you give a street musician money if they wanted your name, address and credit card details? No, but you'd toss a little cash in his hat gladly. Some of the improvements planned for bitcoin do have this future in mind, so I'll keep my bets on that square for the moment.
Striek, so long as you deal with YouTube, you are dealing with a multi billion dollar system where essentially zero dollars come from your viewers. The money you seek for creating your videos comes from private business interests, so you should not be surprised when they get to make the decisions about who gets to have their money. To complain about this situation is Quixotic.
My advice is that you should be angry. But you should broadcast the message of how beholden YouTube is to corporate greed instead of the audience. The symptom is a real chilling of free speech, which is horrific I would agree. The sickness needing a cure however is advertiser greed and control.
Analogy time to ensure everyone is crystal clear about what YouTube is:
1. The public is the product.
2. Advertisers are the customer.
3. Google is the market owner taking their cut.
4. What about content creators you ask? They are only flavor additives, injected into the product to distinguish all the varieties so that customers (advertisers) may have options that maximize their gain.
Yes, the flavor additive costs a small amount of money as a routine matter of business, but this small overhead is a good deal for corporate interests. The copyright DMCA thugs of the world are nothing special, they are just very good at gathering and stealing the crumbs of others. So we sit around watching people squabble over content creator crumbs, while for every dollar tossed their way, hundreds in profit are silently passed higher up the pyramid. The public and the content creators are both suckers in this scheme.
In the end, we must seek out new and better ways of conducting our affairs rather than tilt at Google's windmill. This era cannot last forever, where we have allowed middle men with selfish motives to interfere with the creation and consumption of art. Micro-payments directly between the audience and the creators without middlemen (be it music, video, art, books, whatever) is the inevitable long term future. Evolutionary principles seem to dictate this, we just haven't yet developed the right tools.
So the question is if any of us will be alive to see this future when it arrives. And who of us will play a role in enabling it? I'm ready and patiently standing by.
Yeah I've heard this argument before many times, and believe me, i don't go looking for un-trusted code to run! But we now live in a world where NO code can be trusted. The corporations would seek rent in perpetuity, and bad actors can exert their will on open source projects in a number of profound ways; if not through outright deception, then through controlling payroll and funding for developers.
However, i also know that there are things called process trees. Dockers. VM's. To be a functional OS, "something" needs to be tracking at some level which processes have instantiated other process so it can, well, simply be an operating system. This something should grow to a level we can trust in protecting us rather than the current state of unfettered resource access to any code that asks for it.
On the side I was thinking of obfuscation techniques when i was thinking of the cat and mouse problem. Processes hiding their actions and weaseling out of whatever controls the OS is trying to enforce is an age old comp. sci. battle zone. But i still think this is a worthy and beatable computer science problem.
I'd love to hear Mr. Hypponen's take on it.
Since moving to Linux about 8 years ago, there's been one thing I have missed, which i still feel is a regression: The ability to use 3rd party purchased programs to control what local processes may access the network. No operating system makes this default, but in Linux-Land, it seems guys like me get actively ridiculed for suggesting "blocking a port" != "blocking an app", which is a bit annoying. There are some promising projects like SELinux, but to date, they are not able to bring this capability into user space in any meaningful or intuitive way that I've been able to find.
Reason I ask: I respect the technological challenge this problem poses, but it still just seems like low hanging fruit to by default say: Programs don't get resources unless a user with elevated rights decides to permit this. It's not like it has never been done before. To imagine the potential benefit: Crypto ransom-ware could be de-fanged if one could decide to only whitelist processes they trusted. If malwareX found its way onto your system, but couldn't by default access corporate network file shares then damage would be hugely negated. While we're at it, let's take away default local disk access outside of highly constrained limits.
Yes. It is a continuation of the cat and mouse game, but currently it seems like the good guys working on desktop OS's aren't putting up much of a fight. My Linux smart phone has better permission controls than my Linux laptop for crying out loud...
The question:
Why do you think the computing industry is so trusting of developers and the corporations that feed them, that they by default always give processes unfettered and unquestioned access to the internet? Are the foxes watching the chickens? Do you foresee any improvements coming in our lifetime?
Or are we doomed? Shall we just roll over and trust our new programmer overlords without question?
Agree with Alypius: Ban Inhabitat from/.. I actually like Inhabitat and visit it frequently to see cool green architectural and design ideas, but the journalistic standards are utter crap.
In the good old days they just showed green design and living ideas, and it was great. But they are NOT journalists, and recently, I wish they'd stop trying to do "news". It diminishes what they're good at: sexy photos of cool ideas.
This. Over entitled spy agencies are horribly dangerous as once they are created, they completely overpower legislators with their ability to learn and leak embarrassing details which will get them booted from office. Similar to the military industrial complex combined with a standing permanent military. Once it is sufficiently sized (ours is oversized) if you don't give it wars to fight, it will go create them.
Genie is out of the bottle, nothing short of a drastic and revolutionary change can ever put it back. Not gonna happen until everyone in the world including MP's have been deeply and thoroughly ass-raped by the genie.
The cat and mouse game between black-hats and FOSS developers in the end usually just makes the code better. When I read the original article back in Feb, I kind of thought it would be cool if they found a few Tor vuln's to fix, even if they exploited them for a while before the public discovered them.
But now Putin and his cronies are probably just going to get more aggressive with their anti-encryption stances, if that's even possible. It's all gonna backfire on them one day.
....but over the last years, I've started to really cheer in glee every time there's a horrible breach of sensitive data.
Only after a percentage of people are thoroughly harmed and screwed by the escape of sensitive information, will the world realize that there simply is no sound way to keep secrets safe. It is a logical fallacy for one to think they can make a system that is perfectly secure as every measure has a countermeasure
Therefore, the only option that will remain after a sufficient number of people get fleeced, fucked and flogged will be to never collect it in the first place. To collect it, is to invite evil-doers to an all you can eat buffet.
So celebrate the evil blackhats of the world!! Huzzah! For us to see progress, they must steal their billions, destroy lives, maim murder and pillage! Sure, we technology buffs understand risks and speak loudly about the NSAs, Facebooks and all the other "user abusers" of the world. But we clever geeks can never convince the masses to change their ways because our message is inconvenient.
No sir. Until enough good people are fucked, the assholes of the world will keep winning the minds of innocent fools with lies like "If you've done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide". How about this one, "We collect your information in order to better serve you". Orwell is spinning in his grave.
Ending my rant: Good people need encryption and privacy the most, but they won't realize this until they've been burned by fire. So burn baby burn.
The Ministry of Truth says you must use your Brother issued memory hole. Remember citizens:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Why would our Brother store knowledge and data? These things are unalways good for Brother. You know the old speaking: those who never learn history are doomed to... Um. Wow, kittens! My speakwrite told me yesterday that Oceania kills kittens, I like kittens, we must destroy Oceania!
We must all be strong. Ignorance is strength. Big Brother is doubleplusgood.
In a perfect world one could be honest and use their real identities online. But we live in this world where shit's messed up at the moment.
Unless you need a public persona for your job, or are really committed to being on the front line of an info-war, you are a naive fool if you don't carefully take all prudent measures to preserve your privacy. The "social" fad has just created human cannon fodder for trolls, corporate identity mining operations and nation state surveillance.
So it is with regret that I must inform you: we need more people like you to keep getting doxxed and screwed as collateral damage until enough people wake up and realize that privacy is a pivotal component of a civilized and free society. Good and honest people have the MOST to hide if they want to avoid getting taken advantage of. Don't buy the lies of the "if you have nothing to hide" argument.
Whatever you were doing on the website which screwed you: it should not have required any link to your true identity. If you provided personal info out of free will, then you only have yourself to blame. Sorry for the sour grapes, but there's no recourse. Take the black eye. Soldier on with your life with lessons learned.
Signed your's truly,
{any name I sign with is false}
P.S. Get a password manager and lots of disposable email accounts. If you feel compelled to participate on a forum (hello Dice), do not reuse credentials, emails or nicknames. And even if the administrator is your best friend who you trust with your life, FOLLOW THESE RULES! It's the blackhat who p0wns his website or the troll who abuses it, who you need to protect yourself from, not your friend.
As with life, you need to think and act for yourself a bit here. No free and easy answers, but it's unlikely that you're "infected", you probably just have a lot of bloatware apps draining resources and spying on you. Remember, the boundary between malware and adware/spyware is thin indeed, so your best bet is to start at the beginning and re-think your digital life.
Everything we do on our phones fits into one of two broad categories:
1. Personal and work life. Deeply private, sensitive and important communications with friends, family and colleagues.
2. Time Wasting / Entertainment / Infotainment. Reading news, watching videos, games, app-du-jour, whatever.
Given the state of our corporate overlords, there is no reasonable way if you care for your privacy and safety to have both sets of functions combined into one device. You got into your predicament by not realizing this. You seem like a conscientious fellow so here's a tip based on what I do:
Get two devices:
Phone 1: Email, voice and sms communications, photos. Nothing else. It's my life, both business and personal. NO APPS except the few which support these needs. No social crapware either. If posting that photo of my food can't wait until I get to my laptop, then it helps me realize that it isn't worth uploading - nobody wants to see it anyhow.
Phone 2: A phablet with a data only 4g sim card (20 bucks a month for 3 gigs). Has apps, games and browsers for boring flights, lunch breaks, whatever. It can get p0wned, i don't care, as it's registered to a disposable gmail account and contains no personally identifying info apart from the 4g account which Vodafone can spy on. I could drop it in the trash and lose nothing but the cash to buy another, and the 3 gigs is plenty for all my time wasting needs each month.
For phone 1, you can only be reasonably confident it is clean if you get the phone new, and discipline yourself to not fill it up with crapware. You may root the phone to remove the factory installed bloat ware, but never to side-load even more sketchy apps. Trust nothing.
For phone 2, it hardly matters what you do as long as you don't fill it up with your private life. Have fun and enjoy if it ever gets malware. Wipe it if it ever gets slow and re-install the apps you enjoyed most. If any of these apps want to make your life "convenient" by tapping into the stuff on Phone number 1: stop. You're welcome.
It is a shit idea to mix the two spheres, because remember, all of the app authors in the world just want to monetize your life. They aren't writing the apps because they love you, or because they are good Samaritans. Every last one of them (with a few notable exceptions) wants a paycheck. So don't be used, be a user.
I don't want to quibble over percentages, but it's not 100% stupid because there is only 1 difference between a missile and a vehicle with a human driver:
One has the will to live.
If we remove the human drivers and pilots, then we'll be living in a world where people and things just become remote operated payload.
And no, a human driving a tow truck won't "deliver" a van full of fertilizer to a crowded event for you without asking pesky questions. FedEx limits the size of the explosives you can deliver to what a guy can carry in a box. Best of all, pesky humans all along the way (the way it works today) might mess up your evil plans at any point, or be witness to something that leads back to you. Committing huge evil is quite inconvenient today - by design.
No. It is an excellent design practice to keep humans involved with their desire for self preservation always present. We should arm humans with all the pedestrian detecting, wakefulness sensing, safety technology we can muster. But keep them in the drivers seat.
The alternative is a distributed massively scaled weapons system disguised as a means of convenient transport.
The only important difference between a vehicle with a human driver and a guided missile is that one of them has the will to live.
Remove the will to live from the piloting decisions, and you just become payload in a remotely guided missile. Going back to the main point: that changes everything.
@im_thatoneguy
We are happy that you are content to be the revenue generating property of Microsoft.
Just understand that your long rationalization of how convenient and awesome your computer lifestyle is overlooks the blazing moral issues the rest of us are displeased with. What you really are endorsing is a future where the single corporate gatekeeper model is perpetuated with said gatekeepers in a position of power which has never been so concentrated in the history of the world.
All of the large OS and Web Service corporations are gunning for this role: to be positioned such that they will
1. Extract profit on all human purchasing activity
2. Control what you are allowed to see via advertising, search and censorship bubbles
3. Complete awareness of who you are and what your personal motivations are so as to maximize the above while providing value to the nation states in which they must operate who would gladly be given access to the above data treasure.
This is all being sold to you in the name of your benefit and convenience. And you bought it.
This I'm sure will sound alarmist to you, but we see the end game, you don't. Enjoy it while you can.
Might be technically true that they aren't deleted, but they can get marked "off topic" and disappear from all but the most determined efforts to find them.
Deleted versus sent to the nether-worlds. No diff.
Good point. God i dislike that StartsWithABang dude and his medium blog. I should hope new overlords do a better job of stopping blog posts from being represented as news. It is not generally speaking a newsworthy event if a blogger wrote another blog post. And I say that as a total fan of all things space and astronomy. I might even have liked that dude's blog if he weren’t spamming us every time he wrote another post.....
Depends on the crime. Crimes have different statute of limitations and expungement periods based on severity as written into the laws of each jurisdiction. Many crimes are rightly never forgiven, and can always be prosecuted no matter how old the evidence might be. (Murder, rape, etc..)
I am not wanting total amnesia, and think this is a misrepresentation of what the French are after. Furthermore, I disagree with those blatant criminals and ass-hole movie stars who want a global delete button to suit their private and selfish purposes.
I only want law to apply to the information which technology companies gather and harvest from us. Lauren Weinstein's and her ilk misrepresent and twist this sensible desire.
If a minor crime i committed has been expunged from my public record. If youthful indiscretion has marred my social feed. If an enemy slanders me online. We should be able to seek remedies just as we can if we discover our credit history contains errors or fraud. That's all this is about. "Global delete buttons" are hyperbole.
I'm well aware of how difficult this is from a technological viewpoint, given the nature of the internet. But it's a noble pursuit to bring justice and law online while at the same time embracing encryption and privacy. It's going to take a few generations to find solutions, and I have no idea how it will pan out. Anyone who says they know is a liar I suspect. But I’m optimistic that barring biased trash like the OP from L. Weinstein, we will find ways to write software that lets us exercise law, grant privacy, and to eat our cake too.
Say one kind of power cable costs 400 dollars, but it lasts 100 years before maintenance.
Then say another power cable is a bargain at just 100 dollars but lasts 10 years before it must be serviced.
The depth of your foresight is the limiting factor in calculating your ROI.
To make matters worse, you're conflating very different things. A house or a car is a private asset. A power line is common infrastructure. If a private man buys a house which costs 4 times as much as that of another man, then we just call him rich and don't care much as it has no impact. But if a city replaces a street with cheap sand to save money, which must be shovelled and patched every time the wind blows, then we all would suffer at how they are making our day to day life worse, burning our money on endless repairs, and contributing to increased wear in our cars. Long term, sand always a more expensive road material if you look beyond today and into the *societal* total cost of ownership.
Past generations have spent vast fortunes on amazing infrastructure that makes our lives better. Why would you now cheap out and get bargain crap that won't be around in a few years.
The average American grandfather built and paid for the infrastructure that made a great nation.
Today's father is just leaving their children two legacies: rising debt and pointless war.
To the poster:
There are general principles built into most bodies of law related to rehabilitation whereby criminal histories are expunged after a period of time.
Likewise, statutes of limitations proscribe a time window after a lesser crime is conducted in which law enforcement must bring charges or else lose the right.
The above ideas together are the brick and mortar of a civilized society whereby we are forgiven for our minor misdeeds and our law enforcement is not able to pick on people they don't like by sifting through their past to dig up j-walking incidents.
Would you do away with these universal and beneficial legal ideas? If not then i suggest the actual correct and moral action is to extend them out into the world, including the internet. If a teenager does something stupid (lets face it we all did at one time) then it is not right or moral for them to be punished by disadvantage in life and job for the rest of their life. This would ammount to a return to feudal caste systems, and you just aren't looking at it correctly if you don't see this simple truth. The internet should not be immune to moral principles and ideas of rehabilitation and justice.
To say otherwise, you just sound like a shill of the tech companies who would be inconvenienced by such things in their quest for ever higher profit margins.
Thanks for posting from TFA, inspired me to go read it. Pretty messed up stuff. Broken politics aside, their conjuring up of "duhr, 'cause terruhrists, russia, china, much scare, very fear!" arguments are insignificant to me.
However coronal mass ejections are very real and very scary for power distribution networks, and I would say that even without phantom evils going bump in the night, hardening power distribution against EM events is an issue all nations should tackle.
As an outsider living in Europe though looking over the pond... I must say: It's all a symptom of a deeper illness I see in the USA: A short sighted attitude in isn't able to fund long term investment projects which will enrich future generations. The US used to know how to do this, but has forgotten. When I visit the US now days, I just see crumbling and ugly infrastructure everywhere I look. Crumbling infrastructure which was left by our grandfather's generation. Depressing like hell.
Back on topic, hanging medium voltage power cables from poles in US cities: WTF why? They might increase your vulnerability to EMP pulses a bit, but they are also just dumb by every possible measurement except the extremely short sighted near term where they seem cheaper. Long term though, you guys need to replace them after every major snow storm, wind storm, fallen tree branch, when they rot, or when a truck drives into one. The cherry on top is their horrible ugliness! Only costs a few times more to bury them but you won't need to service it for a century! Srsly.
So bury your medium voltage power throughout your cities. Yes, a lower EMP inductive surface area is nice, as buried cables are much better shielded. But it's also significantly cheaper long term and leaves your cities looking beautiful.
Nice side effect: your lights and heat all tend to stay on even during record breaking blizzards, hurricanes and ice storms. What's not to love? You don't need EMP fear mongering or phantom terrorists to justify doing this since it makes sense on every level to bury medium voltage power cables.
As another in Germany responsible for IT stuff, i can second the fact that we avoid US software, hardware and services at every chance.
Sorry US tech firms: your Industrial Military Complex has fucked you. Go fuck it back and recover your civic freedom while ending your contrived wars.
We might then start trusting you again, but until then, we're doing fine without US products. This oddly US idea that it is at the centre of the universe is delusional. Despite the best efforts of US foreign policy, we're still doing fine out here in the rest of the planet where the majority of humanity lives.
...Having a country full of music majors and basket weavers might be interesting, it doesn't help much in the modern world. But if you say "free education for all" you are going to invite a bunch of young kids to get useless degrees from overpaid universities and end up adding to your debt load (not that Germany has all that much debt load at this point compared to the rest of the EU). What you really want to do is encourage the kinds of education that will reap you benefits. You want engineers, scientists, linguist and capable managers of businesses and finance, not basket weavers, musicians, artists in abundance.
Bobbied: Good thing the German system doesn't have basket-weaving as a major.
The available majors are controlled and vetted to a degree on the basis of being beneficial for society. The arts have a small place, sports, not so much. However a majority of the available course options students in Germany have are in industrious fruitful directions. The universities around Germany are quite keen get their students out into the work force as it raises their prestige.
Sorry dude, but that means the buried lines weren't done right. They must have put non-waterproof equipment or junctions underground - I've seen this silly engineering before in the US. The thinking goes: This sewer *never* floods and has only 1 yard of water in it - we can mount our non-submersible junction box high on the wall fast and cheap. Then the 10 or 50 year storm arrives and folks are SOL.
As an expat US citizen living in North Germany, I am quite keen to look in the ditches when they are servicing the utilities and they do all cables and junctions under 3-5 yards of raw wet earth. Sidewalks are all reusable paver stones and all utilities are essentially below the sidewalks. The power stations and transformer farms are above ground - often in locked bunker style buildings hidden everywhere out of sight, and the below ground cables are all sealed in these interesting water proof giant shrink-glue wrappings with stainless spring side clamp protective seals. Not a single suspended power or phone cable anywhere, and outages are super rare. In the 10 years I've lived here, I've seen 2 brief five minute outages caused by scheduled maintenance. And I've seen crazy ice storms that coat trees (and my poor car) with 2 inches of solid ice and severe rain storms which cause sporadic temporary flooding. The lights and heat stay on.
If US utilities want to learn how to bury infrastructure, they should visit Germany. It's an art form here, and as a mechanical / electrical engineer, I love observing their clever tricks. They got us licked on this point.
I'm an expat US citizen living in North Germany and every time I return to the states, the ugly power lines shock me. I've stopped visiting family - they mostly visit me - because last time I was in the US I felt suicidal with depression about how stupid everything was getting. I'm a patriot, which makes it hurt even more when I see dumb things like power lines in the air, crumbling sidewalks, eat-in-your-car culture, and uninsured families.
Here in Germany, the major cities have no power lines in the air. It's a ridiculous idea to the locals and those who have visited the US always comment on the ugly cables on poles in the US spoiling otherwise beautiful locations. Aside from being ass-ugly, suspended lines are HUGELY expensive and dangerous if you are planning for a future which is longer than 10 years. Europeans are long planners. And every 4 or 5 years we get crazy ice storms which coat trees in an inch of ice, but power outages are very (very) rare. It costs a bit more upfront to dig a trench, but it's essentially a 1 time cost. Service work is also safer - jump in a hole instead of hanging from a basket. I spend a lot of time in Hamburg and these guys are real pros at digging a ditch to expose a power line - putting a tent over it to work, and 24h later - filling the hole and re-setting the old pavement stones so you can't tell anything happened.
Oh and they never pour cement for sidewalks. It's far cheaper, creates less rain water run-off and is more beautiful to use pavers on compacted sand, but again you need to think of the lifetime cost of your sidewalks, and not the initial outlay.
In the countryside, there are a higher percentage of suspended power lines, but I live in a small village with a big garden, and I promise you they are aggressively burring everything as fast as they can. Lines in my neighborhood have always been underground but for the cables between towns, in my region last year they just replaced hundreds of miles of suspended cables with buried cables, and laid new fibers for even better broadband at the same time. Later in the year they'll be lighting up 100mbit service options to my little village!:D Previously this was only cheap for city dwellers.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I know Stallman is a public figure who's history means some folks are already rolling their eyes before he gets a word out. But none of the comments here actually address the merit of this thing yet, or the fact that this problem exists to start with.
Regarding the post summary, let's evaluate the current situation. We have a world where media is beholden to advertisers and the public is the product. Injected with "flavor additive content" as tastes dictate, monitored, recorded and demographically categorized for convenient sale to 3rd party interests. I may sound overly dramatic but I don't think I'm exaggerating. The true customers for all ad based media are advertisers. Data aggregators then sell it all onward to corporate and nation state interests. I doubt any right thinking person would say this is a good state of affairs unless they've got vested interests in this particular food chain.
So a solution is necessary. Reading the FAQ blurbs about GNU Taller from the link given though, and as a self proclaimed monetary history and economics buff, I'm not convinced this is the best way forward.
I kind of like how they describe the difference between "sharing" which is anonymous and free as in speech and "transactions" where the income side is somehow not anonymous for businesses. This could be conducive for abolishing income taxation (an immoral action easily evaded by rich people) and moving to a pure consumption tax. Such as:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
Which I would support wholeheartedly. I don't see anything though which would stop GNU Taller from only perpetuating the income tax, which I am morally opposed to.
Lastly I see no mention of micro-payments. We need an anonymous way to issue fractional payments to content creators which doesn't require private details to set up, and which doesn't have service fees that would make arrangements like "a few cents per article" impractical. Bitcoin's upcoming micro-payment channel and side chain ideas are promising, but GNU Taller doesn't seem to touch on this. On this front GNU Taller looks like just more of the same whereby anonymity isn't a real thing: make an account at their site, accept cookies, sign in and be tracked as you use up your deposit.
To get back to the summary of this post, consider this question: Would you give a street musician money if they wanted your name, address and credit card details? No, but you'd toss a little cash in his hat gladly. Some of the improvements planned for bitcoin do have this future in mind, so I'll keep my bets on that square for the moment.
Striek, so long as you deal with YouTube, you are dealing with a multi billion dollar system where essentially zero dollars come from your viewers. The money you seek for creating your videos comes from private business interests, so you should not be surprised when they get to make the decisions about who gets to have their money. To complain about this situation is Quixotic.
My advice is that you should be angry. But you should broadcast the message of how beholden YouTube is to corporate greed instead of the audience. The symptom is a real chilling of free speech, which is horrific I would agree. The sickness needing a cure however is advertiser greed and control.
Analogy time to ensure everyone is crystal clear about what YouTube is:
1. The public is the product.
2. Advertisers are the customer.
3. Google is the market owner taking their cut.
4. What about content creators you ask? They are only flavor additives, injected into the product to distinguish all the varieties so that customers (advertisers) may have options that maximize their gain.
Yes, the flavor additive costs a small amount of money as a routine matter of business, but this small overhead is a good deal for corporate interests. The copyright DMCA thugs of the world are nothing special, they are just very good at gathering and stealing the crumbs of others. So we sit around watching people squabble over content creator crumbs, while for every dollar tossed their way, hundreds in profit are silently passed higher up the pyramid. The public and the content creators are both suckers in this scheme.
In the end, we must seek out new and better ways of conducting our affairs rather than tilt at Google's windmill. This era cannot last forever, where we have allowed middle men with selfish motives to interfere with the creation and consumption of art. Micro-payments directly between the audience and the creators without middlemen (be it music, video, art, books, whatever) is the inevitable long term future. Evolutionary principles seem to dictate this, we just haven't yet developed the right tools.
So the question is if any of us will be alive to see this future when it arrives. And who of us will play a role in enabling it? I'm ready and patiently standing by.
Hey allo, you are right of course. But....
Yeah I've heard this argument before many times, and believe me, i don't go looking for un-trusted code to run! But we now live in a world where NO code can be trusted. The corporations would seek rent in perpetuity, and bad actors can exert their will on open source projects in a number of profound ways; if not through outright deception, then through controlling payroll and funding for developers.
However, i also know that there are things called process trees. Dockers. VM's. To be a functional OS, "something" needs to be tracking at some level which processes have instantiated other process so it can, well, simply be an operating system. This something should grow to a level we can trust in protecting us rather than the current state of unfettered resource access to any code that asks for it.
On the side I was thinking of obfuscation techniques when i was thinking of the cat and mouse problem. Processes hiding their actions and weaseling out of whatever controls the OS is trying to enforce is an age old comp. sci. battle zone. But i still think this is a worthy and beatable computer science problem.
I'd love to hear Mr. Hypponen's take on it.
Since moving to Linux about 8 years ago, there's been one thing I have missed, which i still feel is a regression: The ability to use 3rd party purchased programs to control what local processes may access the network. No operating system makes this default, but in Linux-Land, it seems guys like me get actively ridiculed for suggesting "blocking a port" != "blocking an app", which is a bit annoying. There are some promising projects like SELinux, but to date, they are not able to bring this capability into user space in any meaningful or intuitive way that I've been able to find.
Reason I ask: I respect the technological challenge this problem poses, but it still just seems like low hanging fruit to by default say: Programs don't get resources unless a user with elevated rights decides to permit this. It's not like it has never been done before. To imagine the potential benefit: Crypto ransom-ware could be de-fanged if one could decide to only whitelist processes they trusted. If malwareX found its way onto your system, but couldn't by default access corporate network file shares then damage would be hugely negated. While we're at it, let's take away default local disk access outside of highly constrained limits.
Yes. It is a continuation of the cat and mouse game, but currently it seems like the good guys working on desktop OS's aren't putting up much of a fight. My Linux smart phone has better permission controls than my Linux laptop for crying out loud...
The question:
Why do you think the computing industry is so trusting of developers and the corporations that feed them, that they by default always give processes unfettered and unquestioned access to the internet? Are the foxes watching the chickens? Do you foresee any improvements coming in our lifetime?
Or are we doomed? Shall we just roll over and trust our new programmer overlords without question?
Agree with Alypius: Ban Inhabitat from /.. I actually like Inhabitat and visit it frequently to see cool green architectural and design ideas, but the journalistic standards are utter crap.
In the good old days they just showed green design and living ideas, and it was great. But they are NOT journalists, and recently, I wish they'd stop trying to do "news". It diminishes what they're good at: sexy photos of cool ideas.
This. Over entitled spy agencies are horribly dangerous as once they are created, they completely overpower legislators with their ability to learn and leak embarrassing details which will get them booted from office. Similar to the military industrial complex combined with a standing permanent military. Once it is sufficiently sized (ours is oversized) if you don't give it wars to fight, it will go create them.
Genie is out of the bottle, nothing short of a drastic and revolutionary change can ever put it back. Not gonna happen until everyone in the world including MP's have been deeply and thoroughly ass-raped by the genie.
The cat and mouse game between black-hats and FOSS developers in the end usually just makes the code better. When I read the original article back in Feb, I kind of thought it would be cool if they found a few Tor vuln's to fix, even if they exploited them for a while before the public discovered them.
But now Putin and his cronies are probably just going to get more aggressive with their anti-encryption stances, if that's even possible. It's all gonna backfire on them one day.
....but over the last years, I've started to really cheer in glee every time there's a horrible breach of sensitive data.
Only after a percentage of people are thoroughly harmed and screwed by the escape of sensitive information, will the world realize that there simply is no sound way to keep secrets safe. It is a logical fallacy for one to think they can make a system that is perfectly secure as every measure has a countermeasure
Therefore, the only option that will remain after a sufficient number of people get fleeced, fucked and flogged will be to never collect it in the first place. To collect it, is to invite evil-doers to an all you can eat buffet.
So celebrate the evil blackhats of the world!! Huzzah! For us to see progress, they must steal their billions, destroy lives, maim murder and pillage! Sure, we technology buffs understand risks and speak loudly about the NSAs, Facebooks and all the other "user abusers" of the world. But we clever geeks can never convince the masses to change their ways because our message is inconvenient.
No sir. Until enough good people are fucked, the assholes of the world will keep winning the minds of innocent fools with lies like "If you've done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide". How about this one, "We collect your information in order to better serve you". Orwell is spinning in his grave.
Ending my rant: Good people need encryption and privacy the most, but they won't realize this until they've been burned by fire. So burn baby burn.
The Ministry of Truth says you must use your Brother issued memory hole. Remember citizens:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Why would our Brother store knowledge and data? These things are unalways good for Brother. You know the old speaking: those who never learn history are doomed to... Um. Wow, kittens! My speakwrite told me yesterday that Oceania kills kittens, I like kittens, we must destroy Oceania!
We must all be strong. Ignorance is strength. Big Brother is doubleplusgood.
This. Wish I had mod points.
In a perfect world one could be honest and use their real identities online. But we live in this world where shit's messed up at the moment.
Unless you need a public persona for your job, or are really committed to being on the front line of an info-war, you are a naive fool if you don't carefully take all prudent measures to preserve your privacy. The "social" fad has just created human cannon fodder for trolls, corporate identity mining operations and nation state surveillance.
So it is with regret that I must inform you: we need more people like you to keep getting doxxed and screwed as collateral damage until enough people wake up and realize that privacy is a pivotal component of a civilized and free society. Good and honest people have the MOST to hide if they want to avoid getting taken advantage of. Don't buy the lies of the "if you have nothing to hide" argument.
Whatever you were doing on the website which screwed you: it should not have required any link to your true identity. If you provided personal info out of free will, then you only have yourself to blame. Sorry for the sour grapes, but there's no recourse. Take the black eye. Soldier on with your life with lessons learned.
Signed your's truly,
{any name I sign with is false}
P.S. Get a password manager and lots of disposable email accounts. If you feel compelled to participate on a forum (hello Dice), do not reuse credentials, emails or nicknames. And even if the administrator is your best friend who you trust with your life, FOLLOW THESE RULES! It's the blackhat who p0wns his website or the troll who abuses it, who you need to protect yourself from, not your friend.
As with life, you need to think and act for yourself a bit here. No free and easy answers, but it's unlikely that you're "infected", you probably just have a lot of bloatware apps draining resources and spying on you. Remember, the boundary between malware and adware/spyware is thin indeed, so your best bet is to start at the beginning and re-think your digital life.
Everything we do on our phones fits into one of two broad categories:
1. Personal and work life. Deeply private, sensitive and important communications with friends, family and colleagues. 2. Time Wasting / Entertainment / Infotainment. Reading news, watching videos, games, app-du-jour, whatever.
Given the state of our corporate overlords, there is no reasonable way if you care for your privacy and safety to have both sets of functions combined into one device. You got into your predicament by not realizing this. You seem like a conscientious fellow so here's a tip based on what I do:
Get two devices:
Phone 1: Email, voice and sms communications, photos. Nothing else. It's my life, both business and personal. NO APPS except the few which support these needs. No social crapware either. If posting that photo of my food can't wait until I get to my laptop, then it helps me realize that it isn't worth uploading - nobody wants to see it anyhow. Phone 2: A phablet with a data only 4g sim card (20 bucks a month for 3 gigs). Has apps, games and browsers for boring flights, lunch breaks, whatever. It can get p0wned, i don't care, as it's registered to a disposable gmail account and contains no personally identifying info apart from the 4g account which Vodafone can spy on. I could drop it in the trash and lose nothing but the cash to buy another, and the 3 gigs is plenty for all my time wasting needs each month.
For phone 1, you can only be reasonably confident it is clean if you get the phone new, and discipline yourself to not fill it up with crapware. You may root the phone to remove the factory installed bloat ware, but never to side-load even more sketchy apps. Trust nothing.
For phone 2, it hardly matters what you do as long as you don't fill it up with your private life. Have fun and enjoy if it ever gets malware. Wipe it if it ever gets slow and re-install the apps you enjoyed most. If any of these apps want to make your life "convenient" by tapping into the stuff on Phone number 1: stop. You're welcome.
It is a shit idea to mix the two spheres, because remember, all of the app authors in the world just want to monetize your life. They aren't writing the apps because they love you, or because they are good Samaritans. Every last one of them (with a few notable exceptions) wants a paycheck. So don't be used, be a user.
I don't want to quibble over percentages, but it's not 100% stupid because there is only 1 difference between a missile and a vehicle with a human driver:
One has the will to live.
If we remove the human drivers and pilots, then we'll be living in a world where people and things just become remote operated payload.
And no, a human driving a tow truck won't "deliver" a van full of fertilizer to a crowded event for you without asking pesky questions. FedEx limits the size of the explosives you can deliver to what a guy can carry in a box. Best of all, pesky humans all along the way (the way it works today) might mess up your evil plans at any point, or be witness to something that leads back to you. Committing huge evil is quite inconvenient today - by design.
No. It is an excellent design practice to keep humans involved with their desire for self preservation always present. We should arm humans with all the pedestrian detecting, wakefulness sensing, safety technology we can muster. But keep them in the drivers seat.
The alternative is a distributed massively scaled weapons system disguised as a means of convenient transport.
Sorry Wonkey Monkey, Autonomous Vehicles change everything.
The only important difference between a vehicle with a human driver and a guided missile is that one of them has the will to live.
Remove the will to live from the piloting decisions, and you just become payload in a remotely guided missile. Going back to the main point: that changes everything.
@im_thatoneguy We are happy that you are content to be the revenue generating property of Microsoft.
Just understand that your long rationalization of how convenient and awesome your computer lifestyle is overlooks the blazing moral issues the rest of us are displeased with. What you really are endorsing is a future where the single corporate gatekeeper model is perpetuated with said gatekeepers in a position of power which has never been so concentrated in the history of the world.
All of the large OS and Web Service corporations are gunning for this role: to be positioned such that they will
1. Extract profit on all human purchasing activity
2. Control what you are allowed to see via advertising, search and censorship bubbles
3. Complete awareness of who you are and what your personal motivations are so as to maximize the above while providing value to the nation states in which they must operate who would gladly be given access to the above data treasure.
This is all being sold to you in the name of your benefit and convenience. And you bought it.
This I'm sure will sound alarmist to you, but we see the end game, you don't. Enjoy it while you can.
Might be technically true that they aren't deleted, but they can get marked "off topic" and disappear from all but the most determined efforts to find them.
Deleted versus sent to the nether-worlds. No diff.
Good point. God i dislike that StartsWithABang dude and his medium blog. I should hope new overlords do a better job of stopping blog posts from being represented as news. It is not generally speaking a newsworthy event if a blogger wrote another blog post. And I say that as a total fan of all things space and astronomy. I might even have liked that dude's blog if he weren’t spamming us every time he wrote another post.....
And to the new buyers I say this: Fuck Beta.
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Depends on the crime. Crimes have different statute of limitations and expungement periods based on severity as written into the laws of each jurisdiction. Many crimes are rightly never forgiven, and can always be prosecuted no matter how old the evidence might be. (Murder, rape, etc..)
I am not wanting total amnesia, and think this is a misrepresentation of what the French are after. Furthermore, I disagree with those blatant criminals and ass-hole movie stars who want a global delete button to suit their private and selfish purposes.
I only want law to apply to the information which technology companies gather and harvest from us. Lauren Weinstein's and her ilk misrepresent and twist this sensible desire.
If a minor crime i committed has been expunged from my public record. If youthful indiscretion has marred my social feed. If an enemy slanders me online. We should be able to seek remedies just as we can if we discover our credit history contains errors or fraud. That's all this is about. "Global delete buttons" are hyperbole.
I'm well aware of how difficult this is from a technological viewpoint, given the nature of the internet. But it's a noble pursuit to bring justice and law online while at the same time embracing encryption and privacy. It's going to take a few generations to find solutions, and I have no idea how it will pan out. Anyone who says they know is a liar I suspect. But I’m optimistic that barring biased trash like the OP from L. Weinstein, we will find ways to write software that lets us exercise law, grant privacy, and to eat our cake too.
Say one kind of power cable costs 400 dollars, but it lasts 100 years before maintenance.
Then say another power cable is a bargain at just 100 dollars but lasts 10 years before it must be serviced.
The depth of your foresight is the limiting factor in calculating your ROI.
To make matters worse, you're conflating very different things. A house or a car is a private asset. A power line is common infrastructure. If a private man buys a house which costs 4 times as much as that of another man, then we just call him rich and don't care much as it has no impact. But if a city replaces a street with cheap sand to save money, which must be shovelled and patched every time the wind blows, then we all would suffer at how they are making our day to day life worse, burning our money on endless repairs, and contributing to increased wear in our cars. Long term, sand always a more expensive road material if you look beyond today and into the *societal* total cost of ownership.
Past generations have spent vast fortunes on amazing infrastructure that makes our lives better. Why would you now cheap out and get bargain crap that won't be around in a few years.
The average American grandfather built and paid for the infrastructure that made a great nation.
Today's father is just leaving their children two legacies: rising debt and pointless war.
To the poster: There are general principles built into most bodies of law related to rehabilitation whereby criminal histories are expunged after a period of time. Likewise, statutes of limitations proscribe a time window after a lesser crime is conducted in which law enforcement must bring charges or else lose the right.
The above ideas together are the brick and mortar of a civilized society whereby we are forgiven for our minor misdeeds and our law enforcement is not able to pick on people they don't like by sifting through their past to dig up j-walking incidents.
Would you do away with these universal and beneficial legal ideas? If not then i suggest the actual correct and moral action is to extend them out into the world, including the internet. If a teenager does something stupid (lets face it we all did at one time) then it is not right or moral for them to be punished by disadvantage in life and job for the rest of their life. This would ammount to a return to feudal caste systems, and you just aren't looking at it correctly if you don't see this simple truth. The internet should not be immune to moral principles and ideas of rehabilitation and justice.
To say otherwise, you just sound like a shill of the tech companies who would be inconvenienced by such things in their quest for ever higher profit margins.
Thanks for posting from TFA, inspired me to go read it. Pretty messed up stuff. Broken politics aside, their conjuring up of "duhr, 'cause terruhrists, russia, china, much scare, very fear!" arguments are insignificant to me.
However coronal mass ejections are very real and very scary for power distribution networks, and I would say that even without phantom evils going bump in the night, hardening power distribution against EM events is an issue all nations should tackle.
As an outsider living in Europe though looking over the pond... I must say: It's all a symptom of a deeper illness I see in the USA: A short sighted attitude in isn't able to fund long term investment projects which will enrich future generations. The US used to know how to do this, but has forgotten. When I visit the US now days, I just see crumbling and ugly infrastructure everywhere I look. Crumbling infrastructure which was left by our grandfather's generation. Depressing like hell.
Back on topic, hanging medium voltage power cables from poles in US cities: WTF why? They might increase your vulnerability to EMP pulses a bit, but they are also just dumb by every possible measurement except the extremely short sighted near term where they seem cheaper. Long term though, you guys need to replace them after every major snow storm, wind storm, fallen tree branch, when they rot, or when a truck drives into one. The cherry on top is their horrible ugliness! Only costs a few times more to bury them but you won't need to service it for a century! Srsly.
So bury your medium voltage power throughout your cities. Yes, a lower EMP inductive surface area is nice, as buried cables are much better shielded. But it's also significantly cheaper long term and leaves your cities looking beautiful.
Nice side effect: your lights and heat all tend to stay on even during record breaking blizzards, hurricanes and ice storms. What's not to love? You don't need EMP fear mongering or phantom terrorists to justify doing this since it makes sense on every level to bury medium voltage power cables.
As another in Germany responsible for IT stuff, i can second the fact that we avoid US software, hardware and services at every chance.
Sorry US tech firms: your Industrial Military Complex has fucked you. Go fuck it back and recover your civic freedom while ending your contrived wars.
We might then start trusting you again, but until then, we're doing fine without US products. This oddly US idea that it is at the centre of the universe is delusional. Despite the best efforts of US foreign policy, we're still doing fine out here in the rest of the planet where the majority of humanity lives.
...Having a country full of music majors and basket weavers might be interesting, it doesn't help much in the modern world. But if you say "free education for all" you are going to invite a bunch of young kids to get useless degrees from overpaid universities and end up adding to your debt load (not that Germany has all that much debt load at this point compared to the rest of the EU). What you really want to do is encourage the kinds of education that will reap you benefits. You want engineers, scientists, linguist and capable managers of businesses and finance, not basket weavers, musicians, artists in abundance.
Bobbied: Good thing the German system doesn't have basket-weaving as a major. The available majors are controlled and vetted to a degree on the basis of being beneficial for society. The arts have a small place, sports, not so much. However a majority of the available course options students in Germany have are in industrious fruitful directions. The universities around Germany are quite keen get their students out into the work force as it raises their prestige.
Sorry dude, but that means the buried lines weren't done right. They must have put non-waterproof equipment or junctions underground - I've seen this silly engineering before in the US. The thinking goes: This sewer *never* floods and has only 1 yard of water in it - we can mount our non-submersible junction box high on the wall fast and cheap. Then the 10 or 50 year storm arrives and folks are SOL.
As an expat US citizen living in North Germany, I am quite keen to look in the ditches when they are servicing the utilities and they do all cables and junctions under 3-5 yards of raw wet earth. Sidewalks are all reusable paver stones and all utilities are essentially below the sidewalks. The power stations and transformer farms are above ground - often in locked bunker style buildings hidden everywhere out of sight, and the below ground cables are all sealed in these interesting water proof giant shrink-glue wrappings with stainless spring side clamp protective seals. Not a single suspended power or phone cable anywhere, and outages are super rare. In the 10 years I've lived here, I've seen 2 brief five minute outages caused by scheduled maintenance. And I've seen crazy ice storms that coat trees (and my poor car) with 2 inches of solid ice and severe rain storms which cause sporadic temporary flooding. The lights and heat stay on.
If US utilities want to learn how to bury infrastructure, they should visit Germany. It's an art form here, and as a mechanical / electrical engineer, I love observing their clever tricks. They got us licked on this point.
I'm an expat US citizen living in North Germany and every time I return to the states, the ugly power lines shock me. I've stopped visiting family - they mostly visit me - because last time I was in the US I felt suicidal with depression about how stupid everything was getting. I'm a patriot, which makes it hurt even more when I see dumb things like power lines in the air, crumbling sidewalks, eat-in-your-car culture, and uninsured families.
:D Previously this was only cheap for city dwellers.
Here in Germany, the major cities have no power lines in the air. It's a ridiculous idea to the locals and those who have visited the US always comment on the ugly cables on poles in the US spoiling otherwise beautiful locations. Aside from being ass-ugly, suspended lines are HUGELY expensive and dangerous if you are planning for a future which is longer than 10 years. Europeans are long planners. And every 4 or 5 years we get crazy ice storms which coat trees in an inch of ice, but power outages are very (very) rare. It costs a bit more upfront to dig a trench, but it's essentially a 1 time cost. Service work is also safer - jump in a hole instead of hanging from a basket. I spend a lot of time in Hamburg and these guys are real pros at digging a ditch to expose a power line - putting a tent over it to work, and 24h later - filling the hole and re-setting the old pavement stones so you can't tell anything happened.
Oh and they never pour cement for sidewalks. It's far cheaper, creates less rain water run-off and is more beautiful to use pavers on compacted sand, but again you need to think of the lifetime cost of your sidewalks, and not the initial outlay.
In the countryside, there are a higher percentage of suspended power lines, but I live in a small village with a big garden, and I promise you they are aggressively burring everything as fast as they can. Lines in my neighborhood have always been underground but for the cables between towns, in my region last year they just replaced hundreds of miles of suspended cables with buried cables, and laid new fibers for even better broadband at the same time. Later in the year they'll be lighting up 100mbit service options to my little village!