I was not aware it was inherently considered unethical journalism to uncover those who wish to remain anonymous. Peeling back anonymity can help shed light on the reasons somebody does what they did. Background, motiviations, current involvement, etc. are certainly newsworthy things to examine.
"Plain old tech" people get paid conference passes all the time. Your company buys X amount of stuff from Y vendor (or a business partner), the vendor account rep provides your company with Z full conference passes gratis, and most of those passes end up in the hand of front-line IT grunts (they are the ones most of the education classes are targeted for.) These grunts are no more likely to be familiar with the particular facts of what they were getting interrogated on than any other geek.
Also, it IS a tech conference; RSA just happens to be a security vendor; pretty much every single large tech vendor runs one of these conferences. A "security conference" would be something like DEFCON, one of the several conferences the IEEE runs on security, etc.
And quit with your paranoia about how much RSA is bribing me. I work from home, so it'd be pretty tough for RSA to buy me lunch. The organization I work for (part of a larger IT company) is not an RSA customer. Not everyone that voices vocal disagreement is a sock-puppet; I thought the whole point of the Slashdot comment section was to comment.
All my so-called "pro-RSA" talk on this topic has been motivated by the obnoxious tactics of these protestors, and the knee-jerk silence-equals-guilty attitude. You'd get the same reaction from me if this was a story about PETA sticking microphones in the face of somebody trying to buy some chicken for dinner.
The defense and intelligence parts of the budget have very large parts that are a "black box". As well they should be. It's a bit difficult to carry out secret projects if all your contracts are open to anybody that wants to read them.
Yes, such contracts are vulnerable to abuse and oversight problems. But that doesn't mean that the RSA even has the ability to release the contract if they wanted to.
Giving pure placebos works for some mental health drugs, OTC-dose pain relievers, cholesterol meds, sexual dysfunction drugs, etc. Basically, if the problem could be "in your head", or the drug is intended to be taken by healthy people on a prophylactic basis, the control in a drug trial can safely be a sugar pill. Also eligible for sugar-pill placebos are conditions for which there is no current treatment.
For conditions in which there IS an effective treatment, it is considered unethical to give a placebo during a trial (as in, you'd never give sterile water to a diabetic taking insulin in a trial for a new form of insulin.) And giving a placebo to somebody where going off their current med would be blindingly obvious is simply ineffective. Nobody currently on high-dose opiates is going to somehow not notice they are not receiving a sugar-pill. The withdrawl symptoms are obvious, painful, and aren't going to go away with sheer willpower thinking you are receiving a different opiate.
Most of the attendees at a tech conference are front-line IT grunts (and their managers) sent their by their boss to learn about new products, techniques, etc. Most of them don't work for RSA, nor will most have been in charge of the buying decision to purchase RSA products.
This isn't a "veil of contractual secrecy" being thrown... this is some more-or-less random schmoe having a complete stranger asking him questions on camera on something on which he doesn't have enough information to make an intelligent reply.
They were accused of taking a $10M bribe to backdoor an encryption algorithm. RSA says it's not true. There's zero evidence that RSA knew about the weakness when accepting the money to include the algorithm in their products.
If they truly were going to compromise the security of every one of their customers, why would they have agreed to accept a paltry $10M?
The RSA has already explicitly said the contract doesn't say what they are accused of it saying. What else do you want them to do? They can't go and release the details of a confidential contract simply because somebody thinks it contains something it doesn't have.
Now, I'm not saying that RSA isn't lying, but if they were, would you believe that any contract they produced was an accurate one? Probably not. Talk about "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
The essence of a Ponzi scheme involves outsize returns. A business getting themselves in a cash crunch because they have no clue what they are doing is just a poorly-run business. Indeed, exactly what you described is how most businesses that collect payment prior to service being rendered (contractors, airlines, furniture stores, etc.) go bankrupt.
One of these (a Ponzi scheme) is fraud; the other is just incompetence. There isn't enough room in the jails to lock up every business that gets over their head and leaves customers in the lurch when they go under.
I don't think this little stunt has anything to say about a "problem with a surveillance society"; they have something to say about a problem with some a$$hole ambushing some geeks at a tech conference that just want to get their lunch and get back to the conference sessions.
And the RSA did go on record. They said it wasn't true. As far as going into the gory details of the contract? Contract details of any contract, with any customer, are generally not something a security company is ever going to disclose. That's not surveillance-state paranoia or evidence of evildoing; it's routine business practice.
BitCoins aren't a Ponzi scheme, they are an asset bubble. A Ponzi scheme would be Mt. Gox promising crazy interest rates on BitCoins and absconding with the deposits.
Firstly, I'm not "offended" that the EU would like control of the ICANN contract. I'm simply stating diplomatic realities that simply demanding something when you offer no good reason for the other party to comply is empty grandstanding.
What, specifically, has the US Dept. of Commerce made ICANN do that it would no longer do if it's contract was turned over to another political body? What problem, specifically, with the US owning the ICANN contract are you trying to solve?
And again, why would the US agree to this? All I see is a bunch of whining about how unfair the situation is. What I don't see are any credible threats or inducements for the US to go along. The EU would have just as much luck asking the Russians to pretty please hand over some natural gas for free because it's so unfair that Siberia has such rich petrochemcial resources and Europe does not.
Once there IS a credible counter-proposal, (i.e. "If the US maintains control of ICANN, we'll set up something different", or "If the US gives up control of ICANN, we'll give the US control of...") I imagine the US might come to the bargaining table. But simply complaining about the status quo changes nothing.
I didn't say there were no reasons that it might be nice if ICANN was not under a US contract.
What I said was that there aren't any reasons for the US to go along with this plan. No national government is in the business of giving away power to other countries simply because those other countries want it.
The US "must" do this? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I can see why the EU and/or UN would want the US to give up control over the ICANN contract, but every time this comes up, I have yet to see a single reason presented as to why the US would agree to do it.
Diplomacy involves the practical application of either the proverbial Carrot or Stick or Both. "Do this or I'll write further Official Letters demanding it" is not much of a stick, and it certainly isn't a carrot.
Enlightenment 1.0 (or, at this rate, Enlightenment Beta) will be the perfect window manager for the Hurd, as they should release about the same time. Maybe I'll have them toss some USB sticks of the release versions in my coffin after I die of old age.
The rule says "paid advocates", not "any employee". If the rule was meant to cover all employees, it would say so. It doesn't.
Yes, most employees in a marketing or PR dept. probably qualify as "paid advocates"; I never implied they weren't. When I said "front-line employees" I meant people like engineers, support reps, developers, service reps, etc.
"Q: What constitutes paid advocacy? A: Receiving a payment to promote the interests of a client or employer, as happens in the public relations industry and in the communications departments of many kinds of organizations, is a form of paid advocacy. The reason for doing this is generally to maintain a certain point of view about the client in the eyes of the public."
Front-line employees editing Wikipedia in their downtime or personal time are not being paid to "promote the interests" of their employer on Wikipedia. If "Jimbo" meant "all employees", I imagine he would have said so.
Now, I know that Jimbo didn't write that whole page, but I don't see a single statement on there supporting your view of this rule. Which makes sense, because the rule as you think it stands would, as you stated, make no sense.
In this article, I see a long list of IBM employees editing (often badly) articles about IBM. But the so-called "bright-line" rule appears to apply to people specifically being paid to edit Wikipedia. There's no evidence that IBM as a company even has any idea these employees are doing this, and none of them work for IBM PR or Marketing. (I really doubt IBM has any engineers with "sockpuppet Wikipedia" on their list of job responsibilities.)
I'm pretty sure just about every large company has interested employees editing articles about their employer, and there's no rule against doing so, as long as they aren't doing at the direction of their employer.
I'm not saying that Linux is the be-all, end-all of Free Operating Systems, but after 24 years I think Hurd meets the definition of a failed software project. (And you think Duke Nukem Forever was in development for a while!)
If the developers want to continue developing it, great. But I hope the project is not siphoning off any resources from the FSF's productive work. But I have my doubts as long as the FSF webpages continue to treat Linux as some sort of temporary work-around to Hurd not being available. (And please, just please, let go of the whole GNU/Linux thing... that ship sailed about fifteen years ago.)
My employer, faced with an outsized number of draftsmen, machinists, technicians, etc. and had need for programmers had a program many years ago to turn those non-programming employees into useful developers. I can't speak statistically on how successful the program was, but I can say that one of my former coworkers had gone through the program and became a successful developer.
Recalls commonly happen on consumer goods. For commercial goods, it is pretty common for the buyer to bear the burden of even safety defects post-warranty. The closest example is aviation. After the pretty-short warranty on the plane, any defects, even in design, found later must be repaired by the purchaser, at their cost. This even applies to Airworthiness Directives which, if not fixed by a certain deadline, ground the plane.
And if software manufacturers can (and do) charge for ongoing patches, why can't HP do the same thing for the software that runs on their hardware?
The US Govt. literally Does Not Care what currency you use to transact your daily life. You can use USD, EUR, JPY, Gold, Seashells, whatever, or yes, BitCoins.
As long as you pay your taxes, and, if operating a money transfer business (like a bank or currency exchange) you comply with a very long list of money laundering laws, you are in good shape. Ignore those laws at your peril.
And complying with these laws is hard. Banks have entire large departments that do nothing but shuffle that particular bit of paperwork; it's not a trivial task, and.com entrepreneurs setting up shop from scratch are rather unlikely to get it right (Mt. Gox didn't), if they pay attention at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I was not aware it was inherently considered unethical journalism to uncover those who wish to remain anonymous. Peeling back anonymity can help shed light on the reasons somebody does what they did. Background, motiviations, current involvement, etc. are certainly newsworthy things to examine.
And why is his life in danger?
"Plain old tech" people get paid conference passes all the time. Your company buys X amount of stuff from Y vendor (or a business partner), the vendor account rep provides your company with Z full conference passes gratis, and most of those passes end up in the hand of front-line IT grunts (they are the ones most of the education classes are targeted for.) These grunts are no more likely to be familiar with the particular facts of what they were getting interrogated on than any other geek.
Also, it IS a tech conference; RSA just happens to be a security vendor; pretty much every single large tech vendor runs one of these conferences. A "security conference" would be something like DEFCON, one of the several conferences the IEEE runs on security, etc.
And quit with your paranoia about how much RSA is bribing me. I work from home, so it'd be pretty tough for RSA to buy me lunch. The organization I work for (part of a larger IT company) is not an RSA customer. Not everyone that voices vocal disagreement is a sock-puppet; I thought the whole point of the Slashdot comment section was to comment.
All my so-called "pro-RSA" talk on this topic has been motivated by the obnoxious tactics of these protestors, and the knee-jerk silence-equals-guilty attitude. You'd get the same reaction from me if this was a story about PETA sticking microphones in the face of somebody trying to buy some chicken for dinner.
Tim Cook told a single owner to go *bleep!* himself. The shareholders as a whole voted specifically on this resolution, and rejected it.
$0.5B in BtC's are missing (not all deposits), but they only have liabilities of $60M?
Cute. Are they somehow magically not on the hook for all that missing dough?
If they were a bank, deposits are supposed to be counted as part of your liabilities.
The defense and intelligence parts of the budget have very large parts that are a "black box". As well they should be. It's a bit difficult to carry out secret projects if all your contracts are open to anybody that wants to read them.
Yes, such contracts are vulnerable to abuse and oversight problems. But that doesn't mean that the RSA even has the ability to release the contract if they wanted to.
Giving pure placebos works for some mental health drugs, OTC-dose pain relievers, cholesterol meds, sexual dysfunction drugs, etc. Basically, if the problem could be "in your head", or the drug is intended to be taken by healthy people on a prophylactic basis, the control in a drug trial can safely be a sugar pill. Also eligible for sugar-pill placebos are conditions for which there is no current treatment.
For conditions in which there IS an effective treatment, it is considered unethical to give a placebo during a trial (as in, you'd never give sterile water to a diabetic taking insulin in a trial for a new form of insulin.) And giving a placebo to somebody where going off their current med would be blindingly obvious is simply ineffective. Nobody currently on high-dose opiates is going to somehow not notice they are not receiving a sugar-pill. The withdrawl symptoms are obvious, painful, and aren't going to go away with sheer willpower thinking you are receiving a different opiate.
Most of the attendees at a tech conference are front-line IT grunts (and their managers) sent their by their boss to learn about new products, techniques, etc. Most of them don't work for RSA, nor will most have been in charge of the buying decision to purchase RSA products.
This isn't a "veil of contractual secrecy" being thrown... this is some more-or-less random schmoe having a complete stranger asking him questions on camera on something on which he doesn't have enough information to make an intelligent reply.
They were accused of taking a $10M bribe to backdoor an encryption algorithm. RSA says it's not true. There's zero evidence that RSA knew about the weakness when accepting the money to include the algorithm in their products.
If they truly were going to compromise the security of every one of their customers, why would they have agreed to accept a paltry $10M?
The RSA has already explicitly said the contract doesn't say what they are accused of it saying. What else do you want them to do? They can't go and release the details of a confidential contract simply because somebody thinks it contains something it doesn't have.
Now, I'm not saying that RSA isn't lying, but if they were, would you believe that any contract they produced was an accurate one? Probably not. Talk about "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
The essence of a Ponzi scheme involves outsize returns. A business getting themselves in a cash crunch because they have no clue what they are doing is just a poorly-run business. Indeed, exactly what you described is how most businesses that collect payment prior to service being rendered (contractors, airlines, furniture stores, etc.) go bankrupt.
One of these (a Ponzi scheme) is fraud; the other is just incompetence. There isn't enough room in the jails to lock up every business that gets over their head and leaves customers in the lurch when they go under.
I don't think this little stunt has anything to say about a "problem with a surveillance society"; they have something to say about a problem with some a$$hole ambushing some geeks at a tech conference that just want to get their lunch and get back to the conference sessions.
And the RSA did go on record. They said it wasn't true. As far as going into the gory details of the contract? Contract details of any contract, with any customer, are generally not something a security company is ever going to disclose. That's not surveillance-state paranoia or evidence of evildoing; it's routine business practice.
BitCoins aren't a Ponzi scheme, they are an asset bubble. A Ponzi scheme would be Mt. Gox promising crazy interest rates on BitCoins and absconding with the deposits.
Instead, BitCoins are today's Beanie Babies.
AOL/TW was, by far, much larger than HP/CPQ.
Firstly, I'm not "offended" that the EU would like control of the ICANN contract. I'm simply stating diplomatic realities that simply demanding something when you offer no good reason for the other party to comply is empty grandstanding.
What, specifically, has the US Dept. of Commerce made ICANN do that it would no longer do if it's contract was turned over to another political body? What problem, specifically, with the US owning the ICANN contract are you trying to solve?
And again, why would the US agree to this? All I see is a bunch of whining about how unfair the situation is. What I don't see are any credible threats or inducements for the US to go along. The EU would have just as much luck asking the Russians to pretty please hand over some natural gas for free because it's so unfair that Siberia has such rich petrochemcial resources and Europe does not.
Once there IS a credible counter-proposal, (i.e. "If the US maintains control of ICANN, we'll set up something different", or "If the US gives up control of ICANN, we'll give the US control of...") I imagine the US might come to the bargaining table. But simply complaining about the status quo changes nothing.
I didn't say there were no reasons that it might be nice if ICANN was not under a US contract.
What I said was that there aren't any reasons for the US to go along with this plan. No national government is in the business of giving away power to other countries simply because those other countries want it.
The US "must" do this? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I can see why the EU and/or UN would want the US to give up control over the ICANN contract, but every time this comes up, I have yet to see a single reason presented as to why the US would agree to do it.
Diplomacy involves the practical application of either the proverbial Carrot or Stick or Both. "Do this or I'll write further Official Letters demanding it" is not much of a stick, and it certainly isn't a carrot.
Enlightenment 1.0 (or, at this rate, Enlightenment Beta) will be the perfect window manager for the Hurd, as they should release about the same time. Maybe I'll have them toss some USB sticks of the release versions in my coffin after I die of old age.
The rule says "paid advocates", not "any employee". If the rule was meant to cover all employees, it would say so. It doesn't.
Yes, most employees in a marketing or PR dept. probably qualify as "paid advocates"; I never implied they weren't. When I said "front-line employees" I meant people like engineers, support reps, developers, service reps, etc.
From the Wikipedia page on this rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
"Q: What constitutes paid advocacy?
A: Receiving a payment to promote the interests of a client or employer, as happens in the public relations industry and in the communications departments of many kinds of organizations, is a form of paid advocacy. The reason for doing this is generally to maintain a certain point of view about the client in the eyes of the public."
Front-line employees editing Wikipedia in their downtime or personal time are not being paid to "promote the interests" of their employer on Wikipedia. If "Jimbo" meant "all employees", I imagine he would have said so.
Now, I know that Jimbo didn't write that whole page, but I don't see a single statement on there supporting your view of this rule. Which makes sense, because the rule as you think it stands would, as you stated, make no sense.
In this article, I see a long list of IBM employees editing (often badly) articles about IBM. But the so-called "bright-line" rule appears to apply to people specifically being paid to edit Wikipedia. There's no evidence that IBM as a company even has any idea these employees are doing this, and none of them work for IBM PR or Marketing. (I really doubt IBM has any engineers with "sockpuppet Wikipedia" on their list of job responsibilities.)
I'm pretty sure just about every large company has interested employees editing articles about their employer, and there's no rule against doing so, as long as they aren't doing at the direction of their employer.
I'm not saying that Linux is the be-all, end-all of Free Operating Systems, but after 24 years I think Hurd meets the definition of a failed software project. (And you think Duke Nukem Forever was in development for a while!)
If the developers want to continue developing it, great. But I hope the project is not siphoning off any resources from the FSF's productive work. But I have my doubts as long as the FSF webpages continue to treat Linux as some sort of temporary work-around to Hurd not being available. (And please, just please, let go of the whole GNU/Linux thing... that ship sailed about fifteen years ago.)
My employer, faced with an outsized number of draftsmen, machinists, technicians, etc. and had need for programmers had a program many years ago to turn those non-programming employees into useful developers. I can't speak statistically on how successful the program was, but I can say that one of my former coworkers had gone through the program and became a successful developer.
Recalls commonly happen on consumer goods. For commercial goods, it is pretty common for the buyer to bear the burden of even safety defects post-warranty. The closest example is aviation. After the pretty-short warranty on the plane, any defects, even in design, found later must be repaired by the purchaser, at their cost. This even applies to Airworthiness Directives which, if not fixed by a certain deadline, ground the plane.
And if software manufacturers can (and do) charge for ongoing patches, why can't HP do the same thing for the software that runs on their hardware?
Soylent is hardly bereft of synthetic chemicals and artificial flavorings.
The US Govt. literally Does Not Care what currency you use to transact your daily life. You can use USD, EUR, JPY, Gold, Seashells, whatever, or yes, BitCoins.
As long as you pay your taxes, and, if operating a money transfer business (like a bank or currency exchange) you comply with a very long list of money laundering laws, you are in good shape. Ignore those laws at your peril.
And complying with these laws is hard. Banks have entire large departments that do nothing but shuffle that particular bit of paperwork; it's not a trivial task, and .com entrepreneurs setting up shop from scratch are rather unlikely to get it right (Mt. Gox didn't), if they pay attention at all.