While many of Barbara's posts are factually incorrect and/or just plain moronic, it you go look at the actual tweet, yes, this one was a completely obvious promotion.
You make a good point... why are they hiring writers from the Onion when there are thousands of good writers in Hollywood or the video game industry?
The Onion specializes in brutal, bitingly dry satire. Not so great at witty banter and DIALOG. Pretty sure if I ask an "AI" assistant a question I'd prefer a useful, relevant, and personable answer, not a monologue about the banality of middle America.
I want my personal assistant's bon mots to be whoever wrote the filler dialog to The Wire, Archer, Baldur's Gate II, or Mass Effect (among hundreds of other valid examples)...
He's a cartoonist and satirist skilled in ironic humor. If you have read any of his commentary over the last year it's clear he not only supports Trump, he has been actively campaigning for him.
It's because we don't live in a capitalist society, we live in a managementist society. For a variety of reasons (risk, diversification, buying power), people have been convinced to chop up their "capital" into tiny bits so they really have any say in how it's used by the people who use it.
Look at who actually calls the shots at companies. Google has different classes of stock to "protect" the voting rights of a select few, while harvesting money from the un-anointed.
Eh, both of those statements pretty much ARE the definition of capitalism. I don't think most people understand the origin of the term of the philosophy. Back in the 1500-1800 range when capitalism really started taking hold, capitalism ie. private ownership of the major means of production was as much or more in the hands of a few rich people as it is today. If anything, the 20th century was the most non-capitalist period in modern world history - the (upper) middle class had investment power, unions and pension managers could use the collective funds of blue collar workers to influence corporate direction, and in some cases employees actually collectively owned a significant share of their companies.
Unfortunately, the 21st century has destroyed a lot of that progress (your Google comment is one example) - money is quickly being consolidated in the hands of a few super-wealthy. To me calling them "capitalists" vs "managers" is just semantics, since the 16th-19th century "princes of industry" (form the Medicis to the Rockefellers, with many others in between) aren't much different from the 21st century "Internet billionaires"...
The point in general is taken, but as applied to bank CEOs - it's getting hard to name a major international bank that hasn't been fined hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in the past 5-10 years.
Why is it the CEO gets credit (in the form of utterly MASSIVE - tens to hundreds of million - bonuses) for bank profits, but no punishment when the bank commits wholesale fraud, laundering, or other crimes that collectively screw investors and customers out of BILLIONS?
Why shouldn't populists be absolutely fucking pissed off when a bank executive's department defrauds customers for millions, fires thousands of lackeys doing the dirty work, and then gets a golden parachute worth hundreds of millions? If this was 100+ years ago and the oligarchs didn't also firmly control the police and military states, there would literally be heads rolling....
If 20-30 seconds extra time to give you massively increased security is such an inconvenience, measures like these would not have become so popular in europe, south america and asia. Hell, banks should love it because it'd reduce charge-back fraud too.
This isn't just my statement of personal preference - it's MASSIVE amounts of data proving that is true. It's a marketing and e-commerce fact that the drop off funnel of a mere 30 seconds is huge. Losses from this seemingly tiny "inconvenience" utterly dwarfs any fraud. That's the WHOLE POINT OF THIS DISCUSSION!
You are trying to compare the banking practices of a country with a population the size of the metro area I live in with an entire country that has a GDP larger than all of Europe. And I'm not bragging about that consumer power, in many ways there is a cultural element that may be resisting good ideas. But in the end you don't think VISA has more actuaries and statisticians than almost any other company on the planet? They know exactly what inconveniences the US market will bear, and are willing to eat fraud to preserve top line revenue...
1: The devices are part of standard account package.
YOUR bank's package, but no the package of probably a billion other credit card users.
2: The inconvenience of the sloppy security of US bank practices is greater
No, it's clearly not. I'm not defending the security in any way, I'm just pointing out the FACT that banks sacrifice security for convenience, and they end up knowingly eating the CC fraud costs. They won't change that practice until it's financially worthwhile for THEM.
3: The card reader is not connected to the PC when doing any of the things I mentioned. Only if you choose to use any cert-based method do you need to plug it in, and that's entirely optional.
I just re-read your comment, and WOW, inconvenience is an understatement. When I want to order something on Amazon I click one button, walk away, and it generally arrives the next day. See #2 as to why neither the banks nor Amazon, etc want that to change...
It's basically the same here (I have used maybe 4-5 checks in the past few years) but it cost me NOTHING EXTRA. Some people use more - many more - but it costs them NOTHING EXTRA.
So how does not charging an extra fee for the occasional physical check make the system I use "the Dark Ages"? Seems more like your system gives you no respect for the money you have deposited in your bank that they are investing in their own ventures without any significant gain for you. I bet you think your system is somehow different from "pure Capitalism", huh? How quaint.
I'm not sure what you are going for here, but your "argument" isn't adding anything. You focused on a trivially unlikely part of my OP and didn't even quote it correctly.
"End-to-end cryptographic security" != "end to end encryption" - you changed that phrasing yourself. E2E security means everything in the process by definition, OBVIOUSLY.
But that's just addressing the totally fucking irrelevant part of your any my posts. Almost nothing to do with the real point. Assuming you write code for banks and are defending the horrible practices they just put in place this year!?
That would be awesome if every online consumer could have their own secure card reader but there are several major issues with that:
1) that's a HUGE expense for all credit card users worldwide
2) it's an even HUGER inconvenience - which I should probably have listed as #1 since that's all the big banks (sorry Sweden) care about
3) a card reader connected to a PC is a huge hacking vector - if someone came up with "perfect security" that wouldn't matter but no one has yet...
Clearly enforcing end-to-end cryptographic security is the beset solution, but as has already been state several times the credit card companies, banks, and point of sale retailers just don't WANT that.
You and I both know - and this isn't state of the art, it's trivial - how this whole system could be made 100x more secure, I'm sure. But the point is it's not about security it's about cost of fraud vs cost of convenience. That's it. And unfortunately it's not the cost of convenience of consumers DEFRAUDED, it's cost of convenience of consumers putting a balance on their card...
Not everybody is stuck in the banking dark-ages like the US
That's silly, it has NOTHING to do with antiquated technology, it has to do with history and cultural differences.
I live in the US and have all of my automated withdrawls from my checking account, both methods have been offered for many years. But as I said using CC for recurring payments is a cultural thing - credit cards have a much longer and more prominent history in the US, so people are more comfortable using them than in Europe. Many recurring services in Europe offer CC payments, the fact that people don't use them in that case is the CONSUMER choice, not a technological one.
Second, for credit-card based schemes, you authenticate once and then the bank knows these are legit and it works without further authentication.
If you are talking about US-based credit card recurring payments (assumed since you just claimed Europe doesn't use that) then totally untrue. You have never worked in this field, I assume... One of the big pains-in-the-ass of scheduled payments and pre-orders fulfilled later, etc, is that often the card of record expires and the transaction can't be processed. (There are also systems in place to update card info to a new number, but only if it's verified and the retailer properly supports it). But in any case, credit card transaction processing is a multistep process, and an authentication step is performed every time a new transaction is posted.
The US now uses chip cards as well (though there are some retailers still using swipe, which is now officially retailer's responsibility to pay for fraud in that case) - this has NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT.
It's not really related to online purchases, but since you don't seem to know much about this... chip and pin vs chip and signature comes down to one thing: a 2nd factor authentication. For IN PERSON retail transactions, the "chip" basically means a CC# (which is all the mag stripe really provided) is no longer enough, now the CC# is only accepted from a valid card passing a cryptographic check. That's the first factor: "something you have".
But if your card is stolen, it comes down to the 2nd factor. For chip and pin, that 2nd factor is "something you know". For chip and signature, it's really closer to "something you are" (biometric). Problem is, the "biometric" signature is pretty easily fooled, and the current verification (in theory could be a computer, but in reality is some totally untrained clerk/waiter/etc who has no clue how to validate it) is absurd.
Summary, it, the chip and pin solution is designed to make it genuinely harder to use a stolen CC, and the chip and signature is designed to make it harder to counterfeit a CC - while making sure it's NOT harder to use it. Basically, the US solution is designed to make sure the banks are covered and the consumers won't stop using credit cards - while not providing any added benefit to CONSUMERS who had their card stolen.
That gets us to online purchases. First, fairly obviously, both chip and pin and chip and signature fail here. CVV was a minor attmept to fix this, but (1) it does nothing to prevent physical credit card theft since it's PRINTED ON THE CARD (useless 2 factor) and (2) it's not actually required by many credit card processing services so there's always a way to get around it.
You'd think given the size of this industry the various actors involved (VISA, MC, banks, retailers, etc) would be smart enough to know all of this and find a good solution? Well, yes, of course they are, and have put much more thought into it than my simplistic summary. But the key point is they don't WANT to fix it, since it turns out they realized any current fixes that would mostly solve the problem would also inconvenience customers and retailers/POS just enough that it might bring revenue gains below fraud losses. Plus, fraud is tax deductible. And, customers and retailers aren't always well informed, so hey, some of the time they just get screwed and lose without even reporting the fraud. All good for the banks and CC companies!
No one said she doesn't support vaccination. But many say she panders to the anti-vax crowd since that's a big part of her base. Did you read the Salon article linked in the previous post? It goes into all of this in detail. It's entirely possible the FDA is indirectly contributing to anti-vaxer problem, but it's pretty much a given Jill Stein is doing so.
Sort of like how Trump panders to evangelicals even though he hasn't seen the inside of a church in decades (outside of his multiple weddings), or Clinton panders to the middle class even though she has no real interest in reigning in Wall Street.
Should that be a deal breaker for voting for her? I wouldn't think so, I think her policies towards vaccinations and the FDA would be reasonable. (if anything the deal breaker is that she's going to get 0.5% of the vote and isn't even *on* the ballots in 1/3 of the states...) But we need to call out all politicians for their pandering, and this is Stein's big example.
Distinction without a difference. She clearly panders to anti-vaxxers, so either she is one or she isn't and therefore is an MD without enough moral code to set the straight despite her loss of influence.
The vaccines aren't mandatory per se, they are mandatory if you want your kids to mix with all of the other kids who don't have parents who aren't complete fuckwads.
Go ahead and homeschool your frail little sunflowers, but don't expect that the rest of us want them to join the herd hoping that OUR vaccinations were enough to protect them.
Caching is no different from distributing once you know your source is illegal. A lot of parts of the DMCA suck, but that's pretty much the only sensible principle of the entire thing.
Seriously, what is your financial situation today vs 2008? I'm really interested in the details here. I'll provide mine in the same way Trump WILL NOT. Provide details of how you were so oppressed over the last 8 years or shut the fuck up.
In 2008 my gross income was maybe ~130K. Last year it was 450K+. What possible fucking reason do I have to regret the last 8 years? I should love Trump's positions, but I have the extra personal burden of social MORALITY. Gotta admit, Obama was a reasonably socially liberal and pitifully financially conservative President. Based on his own statements Trump would be a horribly socially AND financially REGRESSIVE President.
I probably could have dropped the mike there, but can't... I realize I have been extremely fortunate compared to the average in the last 8 years (I am not in the 1%, but definitely the 2-3%) and have donated significantly to various charities. Have you? We know Trump hasn't, outside of his charity that paid for various lawsuits...
We were not discussing getting AWAY from politics, but discussing IT intelligently. To be honest/. is in the 90th percentile in that compared to most other social media sites.
If you want to get AWAY from that, I totally agree to play a game, have fun, and stay off the big boy discussions. Two different things.
The reason it is so shocking that things are so polarized in this election, though, is not that it's the usual minor distinctions between white conservatism and white liberalism that was the last election - it's that the (so called) conservative candidate has dredged up divisive racial and religious issues most of the first world thought was dealt with - and HE GOT MASSIVE SUPPORT FOR IT.
And further, the Euro-literati who thought this was a local American affectation soon realized it is spreading. Why? Because the distribution of wealth today is moving away from the prosperous 50's-60's and back to where it was in the early 1900's. Why should it be any surprise that those affected are not reacting to that!?
Slashdot Mirror
While many of Barbara's posts are factually incorrect and/or just plain moronic, it you go look at the actual tweet, yes, this one was a completely obvious promotion.
Yeah, way to plagiarize something tweeted 4 days ago.
https://twitter.com/horsedivor...
You make a good point... why are they hiring writers from the Onion when there are thousands of good writers in Hollywood or the video game industry?
The Onion specializes in brutal, bitingly dry satire. Not so great at witty banter and DIALOG. Pretty sure if I ask an "AI" assistant a question I'd prefer a useful, relevant, and personable answer, not a monologue about the banality of middle America.
I want my personal assistant's bon mots to be whoever wrote the filler dialog to The Wire, Archer, Baldur's Gate II, or Mass Effect (among hundreds of other valid examples)...
He's a cartoonist and satirist skilled in ironic humor. If you have read any of his commentary over the last year it's clear he not only supports Trump, he has been actively campaigning for him.
Read a bit, realized it's useless and I don't care, which I guess is the whole point, old boss same as the new boss, won't get fooled again...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's because we don't live in a capitalist society, we live in a managementist society. For a variety of reasons (risk, diversification, buying power), people have been convinced to chop up their "capital" into tiny bits so they really have any say in how it's used by the people who use it.
Look at who actually calls the shots at companies. Google has different classes of stock to "protect" the voting rights of a select few, while harvesting money from the un-anointed.
Eh, both of those statements pretty much ARE the definition of capitalism. I don't think most people understand the origin of the term of the philosophy. Back in the 1500-1800 range when capitalism really started taking hold, capitalism ie. private ownership of the major means of production was as much or more in the hands of a few rich people as it is today. If anything, the 20th century was the most non-capitalist period in modern world history - the (upper) middle class had investment power, unions and pension managers could use the collective funds of blue collar workers to influence corporate direction, and in some cases employees actually collectively owned a significant share of their companies.
Unfortunately, the 21st century has destroyed a lot of that progress (your Google comment is one example) - money is quickly being consolidated in the hands of a few super-wealthy. To me calling them "capitalists" vs "managers" is just semantics, since the 16th-19th century "princes of industry" (form the Medicis to the Rockefellers, with many others in between) aren't much different from the 21st century "Internet billionaires"...
The point in general is taken, but as applied to bank CEOs - it's getting hard to name a major international bank that hasn't been fined hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in the past 5-10 years.
Why is it the CEO gets credit (in the form of utterly MASSIVE - tens to hundreds of million - bonuses) for bank profits, but no punishment when the bank commits wholesale fraud, laundering, or other crimes that collectively screw investors and customers out of BILLIONS?
Why shouldn't populists be absolutely fucking pissed off when a bank executive's department defrauds customers for millions, fires thousands of lackeys doing the dirty work, and then gets a golden parachute worth hundreds of millions? If this was 100+ years ago and the oligarchs didn't also firmly control the police and military states, there would literally be heads rolling....
Have you EVER BEEN TO YOUTUBE?
I think half the world's 12 year olds are trying it, but obviously not all are succeeding...
If 20-30 seconds extra time to give you massively increased security is such an inconvenience, measures like these would not have become so popular in europe, south america and asia. Hell, banks should love it because it'd reduce charge-back fraud too.
This isn't just my statement of personal preference - it's MASSIVE amounts of data proving that is true. It's a marketing and e-commerce fact that the drop off funnel of a mere 30 seconds is huge. Losses from this seemingly tiny "inconvenience" utterly dwarfs any fraud. That's the WHOLE POINT OF THIS DISCUSSION!
You are trying to compare the banking practices of a country with a population the size of the metro area I live in with an entire country that has a GDP larger than all of Europe. And I'm not bragging about that consumer power, in many ways there is a cultural element that may be resisting good ideas. But in the end you don't think VISA has more actuaries and statisticians than almost any other company on the planet? They know exactly what inconveniences the US market will bear, and are willing to eat fraud to preserve top line revenue...
1: The devices are part of standard account package.
YOUR bank's package, but no the package of probably a billion other credit card users.
2: The inconvenience of the sloppy security of US bank practices is greater
No, it's clearly not. I'm not defending the security in any way, I'm just pointing out the FACT that banks sacrifice security for convenience, and they end up knowingly eating the CC fraud costs. They won't change that practice until it's financially worthwhile for THEM.
3: The card reader is not connected to the PC when doing any of the things I mentioned. Only if you choose to use any cert-based method do you need to plug it in, and that's entirely optional.
I just re-read your comment, and WOW, inconvenience is an understatement. When I want to order something on Amazon I click one button, walk away, and it generally arrives the next day. See #2 as to why neither the banks nor Amazon, etc want that to change...
It's basically the same here (I have used maybe 4-5 checks in the past few years) but it cost me NOTHING EXTRA. Some people use more - many more - but it costs them NOTHING EXTRA.
So how does not charging an extra fee for the occasional physical check make the system I use "the Dark Ages"? Seems more like your system gives you no respect for the money you have deposited in your bank that they are investing in their own ventures without any significant gain for you. I bet you think your system is somehow different from "pure Capitalism", huh? How quaint.
Irrelevant. If a bank has a definition of "weak" they should be expected to refuse it. If they allow you to choose it then it's not your problem.
I have personally experienced that it's NOT required by ALL, so your assertion of ALL is 100% INCORRECT.
I'm not sure what you are going for here, but your "argument" isn't adding anything. You focused on a trivially unlikely part of my OP and didn't even quote it correctly.
"End-to-end cryptographic security" != "end to end encryption" - you changed that phrasing yourself. E2E security means everything in the process by definition, OBVIOUSLY.
But that's just addressing the totally fucking irrelevant part of your any my posts. Almost nothing to do with the real point. Assuming you write code for banks and are defending the horrible practices they just put in place this year!?
That would be awesome if every online consumer could have their own secure card reader but there are several major issues with that:
1) that's a HUGE expense for all credit card users worldwide
2) it's an even HUGER inconvenience - which I should probably have listed as #1 since that's all the big banks (sorry Sweden) care about
3) a card reader connected to a PC is a huge hacking vector - if someone came up with "perfect security" that wouldn't matter but no one has yet...
Clearly enforcing end-to-end cryptographic security is the beset solution, but as has already been state several times the credit card companies, banks, and point of sale retailers just don't WANT that.
You and I both know - and this isn't state of the art, it's trivial - how this whole system could be made 100x more secure, I'm sure. But the point is it's not about security it's about cost of fraud vs cost of convenience. That's it. And unfortunately it's not the cost of convenience of consumers DEFRAUDED, it's cost of convenience of consumers putting a balance on their card...
Not everybody is stuck in the banking dark-ages like the US
That's silly, it has NOTHING to do with antiquated technology, it has to do with history and cultural differences.
I live in the US and have all of my automated withdrawls from my checking account, both methods have been offered for many years. But as I said using CC for recurring payments is a cultural thing - credit cards have a much longer and more prominent history in the US, so people are more comfortable using them than in Europe. Many recurring services in Europe offer CC payments, the fact that people don't use them in that case is the CONSUMER choice, not a technological one.
Second, for credit-card based schemes, you authenticate once and then the bank knows these are legit and it works without further authentication.
If you are talking about US-based credit card recurring payments (assumed since you just claimed Europe doesn't use that) then totally untrue. You have never worked in this field, I assume... One of the big pains-in-the-ass of scheduled payments and pre-orders fulfilled later, etc, is that often the card of record expires and the transaction can't be processed. (There are also systems in place to update card info to a new number, but only if it's verified and the retailer properly supports it). But in any case, credit card transaction processing is a multistep process, and an authentication step is performed every time a new transaction is posted.
The US now uses chip cards as well (though there are some retailers still using swipe, which is now officially retailer's responsibility to pay for fraud in that case) - this has NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT.
It's not really related to online purchases, but since you don't seem to know much about this... chip and pin vs chip and signature comes down to one thing: a 2nd factor authentication. For IN PERSON retail transactions, the "chip" basically means a CC# (which is all the mag stripe really provided) is no longer enough, now the CC# is only accepted from a valid card passing a cryptographic check. That's the first factor: "something you have".
But if your card is stolen, it comes down to the 2nd factor. For chip and pin, that 2nd factor is "something you know". For chip and signature, it's really closer to "something you are" (biometric). Problem is, the "biometric" signature is pretty easily fooled, and the current verification (in theory could be a computer, but in reality is some totally untrained clerk/waiter/etc who has no clue how to validate it) is absurd.
Summary, it, the chip and pin solution is designed to make it genuinely harder to use a stolen CC, and the chip and signature is designed to make it harder to counterfeit a CC - while making sure it's NOT harder to use it. Basically, the US solution is designed to make sure the banks are covered and the consumers won't stop using credit cards - while not providing any added benefit to CONSUMERS who had their card stolen.
That gets us to online purchases. First, fairly obviously, both chip and pin and chip and signature fail here. CVV was a minor attmept to fix this, but (1) it does nothing to prevent physical credit card theft since it's PRINTED ON THE CARD (useless 2 factor) and (2) it's not actually required by many credit card processing services so there's always a way to get around it.
You'd think given the size of this industry the various actors involved (VISA, MC, banks, retailers, etc) would be smart enough to know all of this and find a good solution? Well, yes, of course they are, and have put much more thought into it than my simplistic summary. But the key point is they don't WANT to fix it, since it turns out they realized any current fixes that would mostly solve the problem would also inconvenience customers and retailers/POS just enough that it might bring revenue gains below fraud losses. Plus, fraud is tax deductible. And, customers and retailers aren't always well informed, so hey, some of the time they just get screwed and lose without even reporting the fraud. All good for the banks and CC companies!
No one said she doesn't support vaccination. But many say she panders to the anti-vax crowd since that's a big part of her base. Did you read the Salon article linked in the previous post? It goes into all of this in detail. It's entirely possible the FDA is indirectly contributing to anti-vaxer problem, but it's pretty much a given Jill Stein is doing so.
Sort of like how Trump panders to evangelicals even though he hasn't seen the inside of a church in decades (outside of his multiple weddings), or Clinton panders to the middle class even though she has no real interest in reigning in Wall Street.
Should that be a deal breaker for voting for her? I wouldn't think so, I think her policies towards vaccinations and the FDA would be reasonable. (if anything the deal breaker is that she's going to get 0.5% of the vote and isn't even *on* the ballots in 1/3 of the states...) But we need to call out all politicians for their pandering, and this is Stein's big example.
Distinction without a difference. She clearly panders to anti-vaxxers, so either she is one or she isn't and therefore is an MD without enough moral code to set the straight despite her loss of influence.
The vaccines aren't mandatory per se, they are mandatory if you want your kids to mix with all of the other kids who don't have parents who aren't complete fuckwads.
Go ahead and homeschool your frail little sunflowers, but don't expect that the rest of us want them to join the herd hoping that OUR vaccinations were enough to protect them.
Caching is no different from distributing once you know your source is illegal. A lot of parts of the DMCA suck, but that's pretty much the only sensible principle of the entire thing.
Obama was hot stuff in 2008 and not so hot today
Seriously, what is your financial situation today vs 2008? I'm really interested in the details here. I'll provide mine in the same way Trump WILL NOT. Provide details of how you were so oppressed over the last 8 years or shut the fuck up.
In 2008 my gross income was maybe ~130K. Last year it was 450K+. What possible fucking reason do I have to regret the last 8 years? I should love Trump's positions, but I have the extra personal burden of social MORALITY. Gotta admit, Obama was a reasonably socially liberal and pitifully financially conservative President. Based on his own statements Trump would be a horribly socially AND financially REGRESSIVE President.
I probably could have dropped the mike there, but can't... I realize I have been extremely fortunate compared to the average in the last 8 years (I am not in the 1%, but definitely the 2-3%) and have donated significantly to various charities. Have you? We know Trump hasn't, outside of his charity that paid for various lawsuits...
We were not discussing getting AWAY from politics, but discussing IT intelligently. To be honest /. is in the 90th percentile in that compared to most other social media sites.
If you want to get AWAY from that, I totally agree to play a game, have fun, and stay off the big boy discussions. Two different things.
The reason it is so shocking that things are so polarized in this election, though, is not that it's the usual minor distinctions between white conservatism and white liberalism that was the last election - it's that the (so called) conservative candidate has dredged up divisive racial and religious issues most of the first world thought was dealt with - and HE GOT MASSIVE SUPPORT FOR IT.
And further, the Euro-literati who thought this was a local American affectation soon realized it is spreading. Why? Because the distribution of wealth today is moving away from the prosperous 50's-60's and back to where it was in the early 1900's. Why should it be any surprise that those affected are not reacting to that!?