If you start making phones with kill switches, that is going to be a very attractive target for hackers.
Imagine if you could wholesale destroy thousands of phones in one go?
And since legislators only barely understand their intended outcomes, and not the unintended consequences, they won't be mandating any proper security with this -- and it will be badly implemented.
But, really, what black hat isn't going to be giddy with glee at the prospect of wiping out a whole bunch of phones in an area?
Yeah, yeah, offtopic because I didn't say 'fuck beta'... I'm just tired of the nerd rage, it gets old after a while.
You presume that the people making the decisions know what the fuck they are doing. I don't think they do.
No, as a matter of fact, I don't. I assume the ones making the decisions are the ones who make the decisions, and them knowing what they're doing isn't a pre-requisite. Just like every other company I've seen -- once management decides this is the direction, for good or for bad, This Is The Direction.
Don't mistake seeing it for what it is with me believing the people making the decisions have a fucking clue. I figure they have as good of a chance of destroying Slashdot as 'fixing' it.
Becoming yet another website of pablum without a niche isn't going to bring in any profits
And, like I said, if they think it will bring them more profits and they want to turn it into "Woman's World Weekly", then that is precisely what they'll do. If that backfires on them, tough. If it works for them, well, they're better at business than I am.
Does that guarantee them profits or anything else they're looking for? I have no idea. I'm simply saying that once management decides on a course of action, the lower echelons (and sometimes the customers) don't matter. And, really, who are the customers at Slashdot? The subscribers? The advertisers? Or the users?
If the rule is "if it's free, you're the product", then what they're selling is the right to advertise to us. If we don't generate enough ad revenue, they might well decide what they want is the right to advertise to someone else.
But never mistake that for me believing the notion that the people making the decisions know what the fuck they're doing -- because I got over that idea over a decade ago. In fact, I'm largely of the opinion that usually they don't know what they're doing.
Let's be clear who the combatants are: Dice vs. Slashdot users.
And Dice is interested in exactly one thing: their revenue stream.
So, if someone with a corner office has decided this will grow revenues... then I assume they don't give a fuck about what we want.
If that means they lose the core audience of Slashdot and turn it into the next Women's World Weekly, that's what they'll do.
Beta does look like ass -- but corporations chasing profits only care about the profits. Thee and me, well, we're just the under-performing product which isn't generating enough ad revenue.
Which was more or less a predictable outcome the moment it got sold to Dice in the first place.
OK, so I understand (vaguely) that this essentially means stuff goes in but doesn't come out.
But if this Planck star bursts forth from a black hole, is any 'information' in a meaningful sense coming back out? Or is the collection of random bits which we defined as 'information' coming back out just a bunch of meaningless noise?
It sounds more like "stuff comes back out, but will have been so mangled by the process that it isn't, strictly speaking, what we'd call 'information'".
I've never been really clear on what is meant by "information" in this context -- it's not like you can figure out that the burst of gamma radiation corresponds to anything specific, it's just a burst of gamma radiation (and whatever else comes out).
Let's face it. Intel is desperate for their chips to still be used in things.
As people are moving to different forms of computers and different kinds of chips, Intel is getting squeezed -- the sales of desktops are down, and increasingly it's stuff like ARM processors which are running things.
I'm betting Intel is doing this to try to ensure they still have a market share, otherwise things are going to start looking pretty bleak for them in the consumer market.
Of course, I worry this is just going to have the effect of trying to foist power-hungry desktop/x86 CPUs onto people who want lower-power stuff for mobile devices.
What we don't want is just a transplanted x86 which hasn't been updated to try to account for lower power devices and getting away from a platform with almost 40 years of baggage.
Why, there's nothing at all wrong with liking those bands... and I'm not saying there is.
I was responding to a post which more or less said "wow, your music must really suck if they use it to induce mental stress".
I can drive my mom away with punk rock, and malls routinely use classical music to drive away teenagers.
I'm guessing Skinny Puppy was deemed to be about as far removed from anything the detainees would have ever heard. But just because you use it to stress out someone, doesn't mean it sucks or there's anything wrong with it.
Or from the wells they're drilling. Much of the water used in fracking is very saline (and thus useless for anything else) and comes from the wells themselves.
Which pulls from the exact same water table and watershed as the locals.
In other words, they are using the local supplies of water.
That it may not be the surface water is irrelevant. If you dry up your water table, it's still gone.
Or do you think underground water is somehow magical and not connected to the rest of it?
Plus, I don't know if I would *want* people to know the Feds considered my music so horrendous that it would induce severe mental stress.
You know, if you play anything loud enough and long enough, you will induce severe mental distress.
And, before you get all smug, here's the playlist they used outside of Manuel Noriega's compound to drive him crazy:
(You've Got) Another Thing Coming - Judas Priest Blue Collar Man - Styx Danger Zone - Kenny Loggins Dead Man's Party - Oingo Boingo Don't Look Back - Boston Electric Spanking of War Babies - Funkadelic Heaven's On Fire - Kiss If I Had A Rocket Launcher - Bruce Cockburn In My Time of Dying - Led Zeppelin Iron Man - Black Sabbath Judgment Day - Whitesnake Jungle Love - Steve Miller No More Mister Nice Guy - Alice Cooper Paradise City - Guns & Roses Panama - Van Halen Paranoid - Black Sabbath Refugee - Tom Petty Renegade - Styx Run Like Hell - Pink Floyd The Party's Over - Journey This Means War - Joan Jett Wanted Dead or Alive - Bon Jovi Wanted Man - Ratt War Pigs - Black Sabbath We're Not Gonna Take It - Twisted Sister You Shook Me All Night Long - AC/DC Your Time is Gonna Come - Led Zeppelin
If you like any of those bands, get over yourself.
So are they considering interrogations a "performance" that needs to be licensed?
And this would be different from playing it in a bar how?
Unless there is an explicit exemption in copyright law which says "except during interrogations", the copyright laws as bought by the media lobby still apply.
If we can be sued by the copyright holders for crap like this, I fail to see why it should be any different for the feds.
They are a self-professed environmental activist organization. That puts the results of their self-done study in question.
And, of course, anything the companies doing the fracking tell us is also in question, because it's in their interests to say "but it's safe". So if you're going to dismiss what the environmentalists tell you, you also need to dismiss what the oil companies are telling you.
It implies that fracking is causing water shortages by destroying watershead via draining.
And where do you think that water comes from? Either wells or the municipal supply -- which will lead to draining the wastershed faster.
Unless these companies are bringing in their own water to do the fracking, it could only be coming from the local supply. And if you're draining that much water, you will have an impact.
It seems like the police periodically 'forget' or ignore things they have been told are illegal, but which they'd prefer to keep doing.
Because they seem to periodically act as if they're legally allowed to delete the contents of your cell phone when you record them doing something illegal.
And, really, if they can overtly ticket you for warning of their speed trap, they'll just find something else to charge you with.
And people wonder why trust for the police is dwindling.
But since they do, and they haven't... we're left with ISPs who have been increasing profits and failing to invest in capacity, and they are now whining they can't afford more capacity.
The way they have been advertising it and expanding the subscriber base, you'd think someone would have clued in to the fact that they also needed to be investing in infrastructure.
But it mostly seems like they've been forgetting about that part.
ISPs say that they don't have enough bandwidth for everything, and that they must throttle traffic.
Because, ISPs have long worked on a model of oversubscription in order to rake in huge amounts of money, while not giving a damn if you get anything resembling the claimed performance.
They just want more and more subscribers paying a monthly bill, but they've mostly all failed to invest in any new capacity in a long time.
In the real world, this would be analagous to going to a hotel and discovering they've got more people than rooms and have therefore installed rows of bunk beds like a military barracks.
Services like Netflix are just highlighting that they're selling more than they have, and leaving the customers short-changed.
They were the ones telling us about all the multimedia experiences we could get on the interwebs, and then the first to start bitching about how much bandwidth the stuff they used in their advertising actually costs.
And, since many ISPs are also cable companies these days, they also want to ensure you use their premium services to watch anything -- this way they can get more money out of you, starve out a competitor, and if they're really lucky charge both you and Netflix for the bandwidth.
Telecoms are largely a pyramid scheme these days in terms of actual capacity, and they know it.
Hmmmm.... so we're going to leverage our synergies in order to more effectively attract women and minorities to the sausage fest of bickering, spite, and lousy editing which is Slashdot.
We feel that presenting these things in a new and hideous form will facilitate an environment in which all can feel welcome to be abused by random strangers on the internet.
We only predict a small decline in established users who have gouged out their eyes in response to the sheer level of fugly we have introduced as a result of this new design, and we hope that users will not notice the stunning loss in both functionality and readability caused by these changes as they will be more pre-occupied with their newly aching eyeballs.
Perhap the position you've chosen to take works for you, but If your only experience with VMWare is workstation then you're hardly an authority.
LOL, oh god, I am most definitely not claiming to be an authority on VMWare (or anything else for that matter).
I'm saying that for me, in my experience with the web, Flash is useless crap that I have no interest in. That I've successfully avoided using it for most of the last decade tells me that, for me, it's hardly indispensable.
2-3 times a year something work related requires it, and my work laptop has IE and Flash on it for only those things. The rest of the time, I use browsers where it's explicitly disabled and don't exactly find myself thinking "gee, if I only had Flash".
Hell no. Which is precisely why I have Noscript, disable 3rd party cookies, use a hosts file to block stuff, don't have Flash installed on my machine, use Ghostery and several other things to block as much crap as possible.
I don't trust the interwebs at all -- which is precisely why I refuse to allow arbitrary code to be executed by any random web site I hit.
Do I think that I'm 100% secure as a result of that? Nope. Do I think I've minimized the risk by disabling/uninstalling this crap and being careful about what sites I'm visiting? Absolutely.
But Flash? Really? You're just asking for trouble, and that has been true a very long time.
That's a convienent position to take but sometimes you don't have a choice.
You know, I have yet to find more than a few places where I truly don't have a choice. And all of those are work-related and maybe only 2-3 times/year.
For those, my work laptop with IE is what gets used. But there is little else that I discover which uses that. Certainly nothing I voluntarily use for my own purposes -- my current desktop is 5+ years old and has never had Flash on it.
I've only used VMWare workstation, not the web client... and I have no desire to access VMs through a web browser, because that's not what I see a web browser as being for.
And, if I truly decide I need Flash, I will run it in a sandboxed VM of Linux under an account with no meaningful name or permissions.
I'm *aware* that there are many things which use Flash, but to date, I've never felt compelled to use it myself.
I personally do not use noscript as this would kill the web. Without javascript it is not useful and a big fucking pain the in ass UAC style to enable for each site.
I take the opposite approach. Most websites do not need Java for what I am using them for. But I have no interest in multimedia, mostly just the text parts.
For a very specific site for a specific task I'm willing to manually (temporarily) allow Javascript -- but my default position is not to allow it.
For me, I find there's very few contexts where I actually need the enable it. Mostly it just seems to support advertising and other stuff I don't want anyway -- because, I don't care that you have a Facebook link on your homepage, and I sure as hell don't want them to track every site I visit.
I guess it all comes down to the kinds of sites you're using.
Slashdot Mirror
If you start making phones with kill switches, that is going to be a very attractive target for hackers.
Imagine if you could wholesale destroy thousands of phones in one go?
And since legislators only barely understand their intended outcomes, and not the unintended consequences, they won't be mandating any proper security with this -- and it will be badly implemented.
But, really, what black hat isn't going to be giddy with glee at the prospect of wiping out a whole bunch of phones in an area?
Yeah, yeah, offtopic because I didn't say 'fuck beta' ... I'm just tired of the nerd rage, it gets old after a while.
No, as a matter of fact, I don't. I assume the ones making the decisions are the ones who make the decisions, and them knowing what they're doing isn't a pre-requisite. Just like every other company I've seen -- once management decides this is the direction, for good or for bad, This Is The Direction.
Don't mistake seeing it for what it is with me believing the people making the decisions have a fucking clue. I figure they have as good of a chance of destroying Slashdot as 'fixing' it.
And, like I said, if they think it will bring them more profits and they want to turn it into "Woman's World Weekly", then that is precisely what they'll do. If that backfires on them, tough. If it works for them, well, they're better at business than I am.
Does that guarantee them profits or anything else they're looking for? I have no idea. I'm simply saying that once management decides on a course of action, the lower echelons (and sometimes the customers) don't matter. And, really, who are the customers at Slashdot? The subscribers? The advertisers? Or the users?
If the rule is "if it's free, you're the product", then what they're selling is the right to advertise to us. If we don't generate enough ad revenue, they might well decide what they want is the right to advertise to someone else.
But never mistake that for me believing the notion that the people making the decisions know what the fuck they're doing -- because I got over that idea over a decade ago. In fact, I'm largely of the opinion that usually they don't know what they're doing.
My thoughts exactly ... knowing how to make military hardware keel over on command is going to be a very valuable thing.
And Dice is interested in exactly one thing: their revenue stream.
So, if someone with a corner office has decided this will grow revenues ... then I assume they don't give a fuck about what we want.
If that means they lose the core audience of Slashdot and turn it into the next Women's World Weekly, that's what they'll do.
Beta does look like ass -- but corporations chasing profits only care about the profits. Thee and me, well, we're just the under-performing product which isn't generating enough ad revenue.
Which was more or less a predictable outcome the moment it got sold to Dice in the first place.
Perhaps you should alleviate some of your own ignorance before you accuse me of it.
It's all connected, and even if it's not pure in that particular place, it's not independent of the rest.
Your lack of understanding how ground water works is your shortcoming, not mine.
Meanwhile, life goes on, sadness accrues, and the real world is unchanged.
OK, so I understand (vaguely) that this essentially means stuff goes in but doesn't come out.
But if this Planck star bursts forth from a black hole, is any 'information' in a meaningful sense coming back out? Or is the collection of random bits which we defined as 'information' coming back out just a bunch of meaningless noise?
It sounds more like "stuff comes back out, but will have been so mangled by the process that it isn't, strictly speaking, what we'd call 'information'".
I've never been really clear on what is meant by "information" in this context -- it's not like you can figure out that the burst of gamma radiation corresponds to anything specific, it's just a burst of gamma radiation (and whatever else comes out).
Let's face it. Intel is desperate for their chips to still be used in things.
As people are moving to different forms of computers and different kinds of chips, Intel is getting squeezed -- the sales of desktops are down, and increasingly it's stuff like ARM processors which are running things.
I'm betting Intel is doing this to try to ensure they still have a market share, otherwise things are going to start looking pretty bleak for them in the consumer market.
Of course, I worry this is just going to have the effect of trying to foist power-hungry desktop/x86 CPUs onto people who want lower-power stuff for mobile devices.
What we don't want is just a transplanted x86 which hasn't been updated to try to account for lower power devices and getting away from a platform with almost 40 years of baggage.
And, thanks to the copyright lobby, the minimum statutory damages are rather sizable.
You know, the "we want eleventy trillion dollars".
Why, there's nothing at all wrong with liking those bands ... and I'm not saying there is.
I was responding to a post which more or less said "wow, your music must really suck if they use it to induce mental stress".
I can drive my mom away with punk rock, and malls routinely use classical music to drive away teenagers.
I'm guessing Skinny Puppy was deemed to be about as far removed from anything the detainees would have ever heard. But just because you use it to stress out someone, doesn't mean it sucks or there's anything wrong with it.
Which pulls from the exact same water table and watershed as the locals.
In other words, they are using the local supplies of water.
That it may not be the surface water is irrelevant. If you dry up your water table, it's still gone.
Or do you think underground water is somehow magical and not connected to the rest of it?
You know, if you play anything loud enough and long enough, you will induce severe mental distress.
And, before you get all smug, here's the playlist they used outside of Manuel Noriega's compound to drive him crazy:
(You've Got) Another Thing Coming - Judas Priest
Blue Collar Man - Styx
Danger Zone - Kenny Loggins
Dead Man's Party - Oingo Boingo
Don't Look Back - Boston
Electric Spanking of War Babies - Funkadelic
Heaven's On Fire - Kiss
If I Had A Rocket Launcher - Bruce Cockburn
In My Time of Dying - Led Zeppelin
Iron Man - Black Sabbath
Judgment Day - Whitesnake
Jungle Love - Steve Miller
No More Mister Nice Guy - Alice Cooper
Paradise City - Guns & Roses
Panama - Van Halen
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
Refugee - Tom Petty
Renegade - Styx
Run Like Hell - Pink Floyd
The Party's Over - Journey
This Means War - Joan Jett
Wanted Dead or Alive - Bon Jovi
Wanted Man - Ratt
War Pigs - Black Sabbath
We're Not Gonna Take It - Twisted Sister
You Shook Me All Night Long - AC/DC
Your Time is Gonna Come - Led Zeppelin
If you like any of those bands, get over yourself.
And this would be different from playing it in a bar how?
Unless there is an explicit exemption in copyright law which says "except during interrogations", the copyright laws as bought by the media lobby still apply.
If we can be sued by the copyright holders for crap like this, I fail to see why it should be any different for the feds.
*Phbtbtbt* The Chinese spies planted it as a bit of culture jamming.
They figure they can disrupt most of the US tech industry by making Slashdot into a steaming turd of ugly.
Judging by the comments the last two days, it appears to be working.
Have you seen the notices showing up on pages which says they're discontinuing the classic and we'll all be forced to use beta soon?
So, you can see it for a while, but they're going to eventually make the new version mandatory.
And I predict traffic will drop measurably the day they do that.
And, of course, anything the companies doing the fracking tell us is also in question, because it's in their interests to say "but it's safe". So if you're going to dismiss what the environmentalists tell you, you also need to dismiss what the oil companies are telling you.
And where do you think that water comes from? Either wells or the municipal supply -- which will lead to draining the wastershed faster.
Unless these companies are bringing in their own water to do the fracking, it could only be coming from the local supply. And if you're draining that much water, you will have an impact.
It seems like the police periodically 'forget' or ignore things they have been told are illegal, but which they'd prefer to keep doing.
Because they seem to periodically act as if they're legally allowed to delete the contents of your cell phone when you record them doing something illegal.
And, really, if they can overtly ticket you for warning of their speed trap, they'll just find something else to charge you with.
And people wonder why trust for the police is dwindling.
But since they do, and they haven't ... we're left with ISPs who have been increasing profits and failing to invest in capacity, and they are now whining they can't afford more capacity.
The way they have been advertising it and expanding the subscriber base, you'd think someone would have clued in to the fact that they also needed to be investing in infrastructure.
But it mostly seems like they've been forgetting about that part.
Because, ISPs have long worked on a model of oversubscription in order to rake in huge amounts of money, while not giving a damn if you get anything resembling the claimed performance.
They just want more and more subscribers paying a monthly bill, but they've mostly all failed to invest in any new capacity in a long time.
In the real world, this would be analagous to going to a hotel and discovering they've got more people than rooms and have therefore installed rows of bunk beds like a military barracks.
Services like Netflix are just highlighting that they're selling more than they have, and leaving the customers short-changed.
They were the ones telling us about all the multimedia experiences we could get on the interwebs, and then the first to start bitching about how much bandwidth the stuff they used in their advertising actually costs.
And, since many ISPs are also cable companies these days, they also want to ensure you use their premium services to watch anything -- this way they can get more money out of you, starve out a competitor, and if they're really lucky charge both you and Netflix for the bandwidth.
Telecoms are largely a pyramid scheme these days in terms of actual capacity, and they know it.
Hmmmm .... so we're going to leverage our synergies in order to more effectively attract women and minorities to the sausage fest of bickering, spite, and lousy editing which is Slashdot.
We feel that presenting these things in a new and hideous form will facilitate an environment in which all can feel welcome to be abused by random strangers on the internet.
We only predict a small decline in established users who have gouged out their eyes in response to the sheer level of fugly we have introduced as a result of this new design, and we hope that users will not notice the stunning loss in both functionality and readability caused by these changes as they will be more pre-occupied with their newly aching eyeballs.
Totally agree.
A have a Linux Mint VM which I use for such things, a completely unprivileged user and the user name is set to be fairly meaningless.
I treat Flash like a pointy object which needs to be handled with care.
LOL, oh god, I am most definitely not claiming to be an authority on VMWare (or anything else for that matter).
I'm saying that for me, in my experience with the web, Flash is useless crap that I have no interest in. That I've successfully avoided using it for most of the last decade tells me that, for me, it's hardly indispensable.
2-3 times a year something work related requires it, and my work laptop has IE and Flash on it for only those things. The rest of the time, I use browsers where it's explicitly disabled and don't exactly find myself thinking "gee, if I only had Flash".
Hell no. Which is precisely why I have Noscript, disable 3rd party cookies, use a hosts file to block stuff, don't have Flash installed on my machine, use Ghostery and several other things to block as much crap as possible.
I don't trust the interwebs at all -- which is precisely why I refuse to allow arbitrary code to be executed by any random web site I hit.
Do I think that I'm 100% secure as a result of that? Nope. Do I think I've minimized the risk by disabling/uninstalling this crap and being careful about what sites I'm visiting? Absolutely.
But Flash? Really? You're just asking for trouble, and that has been true a very long time.
You know, I have yet to find more than a few places where I truly don't have a choice. And all of those are work-related and maybe only 2-3 times/year.
For those, my work laptop with IE is what gets used. But there is little else that I discover which uses that. Certainly nothing I voluntarily use for my own purposes -- my current desktop is 5+ years old and has never had Flash on it.
I've only used VMWare workstation, not the web client ... and I have no desire to access VMs through a web browser, because that's not what I see a web browser as being for.
And, if I truly decide I need Flash, I will run it in a sandboxed VM of Linux under an account with no meaningful name or permissions.
I'm *aware* that there are many things which use Flash, but to date, I've never felt compelled to use it myself.
I take the opposite approach. Most websites do not need Java for what I am using them for. But I have no interest in multimedia, mostly just the text parts.
For a very specific site for a specific task I'm willing to manually (temporarily) allow Javascript -- but my default position is not to allow it.
For me, I find there's very few contexts where I actually need the enable it. Mostly it just seems to support advertising and other stuff I don't want anyway -- because, I don't care that you have a Facebook link on your homepage, and I sure as hell don't want them to track every site I visit.
I guess it all comes down to the kinds of sites you're using.