The British GCHQ taps fibre connections, collects data on EU citizens and shares it with US intelligence services. In response the EU wants to stop sharing information on passenger records for people flying between the EU and the USA
Well, it's right there in the article:
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the European Commission is examining if the U.K. broke EU law, which could lead to an infringement procedure against the British government. This could lead to financial sanctions imposed by the European Court of Justice.
That the UK did this is also something they're looking at.
Well I suppose its easier than suggesting that EU governments should not spy on its citizens.
That's exactly what they're suggesting.
There's also this:
I can not understand why a U.S. citizen has the right to redress in the EU, but an EU citizen does not have the right to redress in the U.S.
As usual, the US won't sign an agreement which says a US entity would have to face laws in other countries, but expect they will get access to those laws when convenient.
It's a one-sided arrangement that isn't working for anyone but the US, and I believe you're going to start seeing countries deciding they're not going to sign up for any more of those. I think people are getting fed up with having terms dictated to them, and aren't going to be willing to keep doing it.
I'm of the opinion that a smart TV is a really stupid idea.
Starting with the fact that I don't trust the vendors (not to spy on me, not to be incompetent at security, not to be douchebags), moving on to the fact that my expected lifespan for the display is longer than the software is going to be useful, and moving on to the fact that they'll eventually try to dictate how I can watch TV and feed that information back to someone else... I just don't see this as being a good thing for me, the consumer.
My current TV (a nice 55" LCD) is used as a monitor only -- my amplifier feeds it a video signal, which it gets from one of several devices. It doesn't participate in channel selection, volume, or anything other than knowing which video signal it needs.
The way manufacturers are going, any device which isn't a full-on computer is never going to be connected to a network, and won't be bought if it requires that. Not my DVD player, not my video game, not my TV. At least not without a firewall rule which prevents it from getting to the internet.
Because they keep demonstrating they're not trustworthy.
I'm not prepared to have some asshole corporation sneak updates onto my TV, or randomly update the EULA saying they're allowed to do whatever bullshit they've come up with this week, or generally act like they own the device when I paid for it.
These smart devices mostly just seem to give the corporations more control over stuff we paid for. Which I'm sure they think is awesome, but I'll pass.
I still don't see what kind of an easy-to-do-in-a-spreadsheet kind of a business "application" would take months or years to do data storage/management in SQL...
Who said "easy to do"? I've seen stuff done in spreadsheets which evolved over years, and I know people who do stuff in Excel that leaves my head spinning.
You'd be amazed at the wacky stuff people can do in Excel. Many of the things I've seen done with it over the years probably evolved over a long time, but the end result is something which isn't trivial to replace without some pretty major investment.
It's just that you can start working in it and incrementally improve it to the point that it's almost a full on application in its own right.
Don't make the mistake of thinking everything people do in Excel is easy to do and you could quickly knock together a replacement. There's a lot of functionality in Excel, and those who have been using it a long time can do some pretty sophisticated things.
You make not like Excel, but don't go around thinking everything which can be (and is) done in Excel is trivial stuff. There's surprising amount of logic and conditional stuff you can build into it that most of us don't even know is there.
If you don't have anything to report, then don't report.
Apple did report something.. and now the media is falling over themselves to try to come up with what that means (ie worthless speculation); it's kinda what they do.
The pundits need to say something, because they get paid to.
The fact is that there most certainly are times when a more sophisticated approach is called for.
Absolutely. But how often are companies willing to pay for them? In my experience, probably far less than you might feel they should.
You say 'musing the tools', they say 'getting their job done with the tools provided to them'.
There's all kinds of things which could or should be written as a specific application -- but getting most companies to invest in them is an uphill battle.
You're a developer. Good for you. Good for me too. But our jobs are not to make patronising unrealistic suggestions to smart people who don't have our particular skillset. Our job is to make it easier for other people to do their jobs. Telling them to hire programmers or run off and learn our skills isn't "making it easier".
This. A thousand times this.
Somewhere along the way, our industry has developed a collective mentality "we're smarter than you, and we will give you what we want even if we have no idea of what you need".
Once you get a little further removed and realize that the stuff we're writing/supporting is intended to help the people who do the real, bread and butter parts of the business -- you start to realize if we're an impediment to them, it's worse than if we weren't there at all.
They're not interested in some smug little bastard looking down his nose at them because they couldn't possibly do what he does. They're interested in getting their stuff done as quickly as possible.
I can tell you there is nothing more frustrating and counterproductive than some kid straight out of school who thinks the world needs to bow at his feet and stand aside to allow him to tell them how they should do things. Sadly, I've also met developers who have been in the industry a long time who still act like that.
In many industries, the people who do the real work of the company have highly specialized knowledge, and software is just a tool. And that tool is either helping them get stuff done, or frustrating the hell out of them.
Acting like we know better than they do (when we in fact know nothing at all about their domain expertise) is at best condescending, and at worst an impediment and a liability.
Next you're going to tell me that it takes a man-month to write a hello world.
Not at all, but I will flat out tell you that I've seen domain specific spreadsheets which have surprisingly little to do with adding numbers, and which if you tried to replace it with a DB application would take you months (or years) to do -- and you'd end up with something you still have to maintain.
Spreadsheets have the really nice feature of still mostly working when you upgrade the version of the software.
I'm not saying they're always the best solution, but surprisingly often it covers the "good enough and within budget" requirements.
I suspect in a lot of corporations if you handed down an edict saying "thou shalt not use spreadsheets for the following things", stuff would grind to a halt for a little while, and everyone would say the hell with it and go back to using them because they work well enough and are readily available.
Don't underestimate just how much business critical stuff is managed in spreadsheets. You might be shocked.
An unsuitable tool might do as a temporary substitute, but long term you really want to use an appropriate tool for the job.
Look at it this way... the 40-ton truck in your metaphor (Excel or something like it) is provided to everyone in the company from day 1. From the receptionist to the CEO, everyone gets a 40-ton truck. You know that everyone can carry the same stuff in their 40-ton trucks because they are all pretty much the same.
Furthermore, before you even leave highschool, people tech you how to use that 40-ton truck.
Now, imagine that you need to solve a new problem, which is shockingly similar to problems you've already solved.
So you could go through 6 months to a year of fighting to get someone to help you build a station wagon with a baby seat and tinted windows, because the 40-ton truck is overkill. And you need to convince someone help pay for the station wagon since they didn't budget for one of those.
After you've gone through all of that process, the station wagon has never materialized, the cost overruns make it look like you're buying a gold-plated Rolls Royce, but the engine is still a cardboard mock-up, and the people building it for you have forgotten to include headlamps, windshield wipers, turn signals, seatbelts, and a speedometer. But if you will submit a change order to have them build those, you can wait another period of time (and even more money).
Or, you take the 40-ton truck to do what you need, take a little extra time to find a parking spot, and in the end you've got something which covered your needs in a shorter period of time and for no extra costs except your time. You can get to the grocery store and back in a few hours, and you're done.
That is why people use spreadsheets and don't always jump straight for the custom application.
I agree. Also, if you rewrite structured code into a "performance oriented approach", you are doing it wrong. Write code so it is easy to understand. Then compilers should understand how to make it fast.
Except code can end up going through so many layers of abstraction, with some of those layers doing things in the most inefficient manner possible because terrible assumptions were made.
Sometimes, you need to plan for both performance and well structured code -- or you can end up writing garbage which makes heavy use of code which does extremely stupid things.
Most people nowadays are so far removed from knowing what's happening close to the metal that they don't often realize you're essentially running thousands of lines of code to do something trivial as heavyweight libraries wrap everything up.
At a certain point, someone needs to be able to determine if the code is the reason your stuff is so damned slow, and if the bloat has gotten out of hand. Sometimes, you really do need to look at your own optimizing.
you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing
Well, you can put together a spreadsheet in a few hours.
What you're describing is likely months of custom development and design, and a whole new thing to maintain.
Spreadsheets are popular because they're easily deployed, don't require any extra licensing, and the people who know how to use them can likely do things with them that some of us would be astounded at.
I know people who use spreadsheets for pretty much everything, because it's available to them readily, and they've been using them for a long time.
It's all well and good to suggest that they use a full-fledged database -- but in reality, they can probably get something useful in a few days for a fraction of the cost.
It sounds like in this instance, the code was just horribly inefficient.
What is good for shareholders is good for business and good for votes needed by those in public office.
Well, what was 'good' for shareholders was getting a product out the door, and not spending all of that money on implementing any actual security.
If there's no penalty for not having good security and/or encryption, why would a company spend money on it? From that perspective, it would be bad for shareholders and business.
If you make it costly to have data breaches, it becomes good for shareholders to implement security.
But, as a general rule, companies only do the 'right' thing when they have no choice, or if it's advantageous to them to do it. Which is why if we didn't have pollution laws, companies would just dump toxic crap wherever they felt.
This is why you run stock android, or one you built yourself not some blur BS.
Yeah, and then the only company you need to worry about not trusting is Google.
Unfortunately, even on a stock Nexus tablet, Google pushes very hard to force you to use their stuff, and actually signed me up for a You Tube account when I launched the app, even though I don't want a You Tube account and never got asked.
I'm pretty sure we're screwed no matter what we run these days.
I'm sure they feel they can write anything they want in an EULA, but I can't see how this is legal.
This is actively taking your data for their own purposes, and should be something with criminal penalties.
And Google recently added terms to the permission for the Android keyboard update which wants more access to your personal information -- forcing me to conclude that any device you buy these days is actively working against you, and is best kept in airplane mode as much as possible.
You don't own and control it -- the assholes in marketing do.
Even before XBone's DRM clusterfuck, they'd guaranteed I wouldn't buy their next-gen crapbox the moment they put ads on my Xbox dashboard...
Yeah, that was what prompted me to disconnect mine from the network too, and even though they've backed down and require only one-time, I'm still not buying the new one.
But if Microsoft is going to start doing this stuff in the core OS, they're really going to further piss off their customers. The last thing I want is advertising embedded in the OS -- because you pretty much have to conclude the OS is spying on you.
In doing this, Windows has more or less become something you simply can't trust, because those advertising hooks will pretty much be into everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's right there in the article:
That the UK did this is also something they're looking at.
That's exactly what they're suggesting.
There's also this:
As usual, the US won't sign an agreement which says a US entity would have to face laws in other countries, but expect they will get access to those laws when convenient.
It's a one-sided arrangement that isn't working for anyone but the US, and I believe you're going to start seeing countries deciding they're not going to sign up for any more of those. I think people are getting fed up with having terms dictated to them, and aren't going to be willing to keep doing it.
I'm of the opinion that a smart TV is a really stupid idea.
Starting with the fact that I don't trust the vendors (not to spy on me, not to be incompetent at security, not to be douchebags), moving on to the fact that my expected lifespan for the display is longer than the software is going to be useful, and moving on to the fact that they'll eventually try to dictate how I can watch TV and feed that information back to someone else ... I just don't see this as being a good thing for me, the consumer.
My current TV (a nice 55" LCD) is used as a monitor only -- my amplifier feeds it a video signal, which it gets from one of several devices. It doesn't participate in channel selection, volume, or anything other than knowing which video signal it needs.
The way manufacturers are going, any device which isn't a full-on computer is never going to be connected to a network, and won't be bought if it requires that. Not my DVD player, not my video game, not my TV. At least not without a firewall rule which prevents it from getting to the internet.
Because they keep demonstrating they're not trustworthy.
I'm not prepared to have some asshole corporation sneak updates onto my TV, or randomly update the EULA saying they're allowed to do whatever bullshit they've come up with this week, or generally act like they own the device when I paid for it.
These smart devices mostly just seem to give the corporations more control over stuff we paid for. Which I'm sure they think is awesome, but I'll pass.
In other news, rumor has it that Microsoft is rapidly trying to get their latest cloud offering 'Microsoft Chlorine' to market as soon as possible.
Analysts expect it to be an exciting new venture in the marketplace and will allow them to compete with Apple in this new and exciting area.
No news yet on DRM requirements.
Doesn't everybody? ;-)
To me they're a cheap line of clothing from KMart or something -- though, I'm sure they're more than just that.
Who said "easy to do"? I've seen stuff done in spreadsheets which evolved over years, and I know people who do stuff in Excel that leaves my head spinning.
You'd be amazed at the wacky stuff people can do in Excel. Many of the things I've seen done with it over the years probably evolved over a long time, but the end result is something which isn't trivial to replace without some pretty major investment.
It's just that you can start working in it and incrementally improve it to the point that it's almost a full on application in its own right.
Don't make the mistake of thinking everything people do in Excel is easy to do and you could quickly knock together a replacement. There's a lot of functionality in Excel, and those who have been using it a long time can do some pretty sophisticated things.
You make not like Excel, but don't go around thinking everything which can be (and is) done in Excel is trivial stuff. There's surprising amount of logic and conditional stuff you can build into it that most of us don't even know is there.
That sounds dirty, I'll be in my bunk. ;-)
Would it really be a strategy to endure 10 years of struggling just to save the day later?
No wonder the economy is in the shitter, apparently the people who run businesses don't know how.
Short-term incompetence isn't a strategy. :-P
Apple did report something .. and now the media is falling over themselves to try to come up with what that means (ie worthless speculation); it's kinda what they do.
The pundits need to say something, because they get paid to.
Absolutely. But how often are companies willing to pay for them? In my experience, probably far less than you might feel they should.
You say 'musing the tools', they say 'getting their job done with the tools provided to them'.
There's all kinds of things which could or should be written as a specific application -- but getting most companies to invest in them is an uphill battle.
This. A thousand times this.
Somewhere along the way, our industry has developed a collective mentality "we're smarter than you, and we will give you what we want even if we have no idea of what you need".
Once you get a little further removed and realize that the stuff we're writing/supporting is intended to help the people who do the real, bread and butter parts of the business -- you start to realize if we're an impediment to them, it's worse than if we weren't there at all.
They're not interested in some smug little bastard looking down his nose at them because they couldn't possibly do what he does. They're interested in getting their stuff done as quickly as possible.
I can tell you there is nothing more frustrating and counterproductive than some kid straight out of school who thinks the world needs to bow at his feet and stand aside to allow him to tell them how they should do things. Sadly, I've also met developers who have been in the industry a long time who still act like that.
In many industries, the people who do the real work of the company have highly specialized knowledge, and software is just a tool. And that tool is either helping them get stuff done, or frustrating the hell out of them.
Acting like we know better than they do (when we in fact know nothing at all about their domain expertise) is at best condescending, and at worst an impediment and a liability.
Not at all, but I will flat out tell you that I've seen domain specific spreadsheets which have surprisingly little to do with adding numbers, and which if you tried to replace it with a DB application would take you months (or years) to do -- and you'd end up with something you still have to maintain.
Spreadsheets have the really nice feature of still mostly working when you upgrade the version of the software.
I'm not saying they're always the best solution, but surprisingly often it covers the "good enough and within budget" requirements.
I suspect in a lot of corporations if you handed down an edict saying "thou shalt not use spreadsheets for the following things", stuff would grind to a halt for a little while, and everyone would say the hell with it and go back to using them because they work well enough and are readily available.
Don't underestimate just how much business critical stuff is managed in spreadsheets. You might be shocked.
Look at it this way ... the 40-ton truck in your metaphor (Excel or something like it) is provided to everyone in the company from day 1. From the receptionist to the CEO, everyone gets a 40-ton truck. You know that everyone can carry the same stuff in their 40-ton trucks because they are all pretty much the same.
Furthermore, before you even leave highschool, people tech you how to use that 40-ton truck.
Now, imagine that you need to solve a new problem, which is shockingly similar to problems you've already solved.
So you could go through 6 months to a year of fighting to get someone to help you build a station wagon with a baby seat and tinted windows, because the 40-ton truck is overkill. And you need to convince someone help pay for the station wagon since they didn't budget for one of those.
After you've gone through all of that process, the station wagon has never materialized, the cost overruns make it look like you're buying a gold-plated Rolls Royce, but the engine is still a cardboard mock-up, and the people building it for you have forgotten to include headlamps, windshield wipers, turn signals, seatbelts, and a speedometer. But if you will submit a change order to have them build those, you can wait another period of time (and even more money).
Or, you take the 40-ton truck to do what you need, take a little extra time to find a parking spot, and in the end you've got something which covered your needs in a shorter period of time and for no extra costs except your time. You can get to the grocery store and back in a few hours, and you're done.
That is why people use spreadsheets and don't always jump straight for the custom application.
Except code can end up going through so many layers of abstraction, with some of those layers doing things in the most inefficient manner possible because terrible assumptions were made.
Sometimes, you need to plan for both performance and well structured code -- or you can end up writing garbage which makes heavy use of code which does extremely stupid things.
Most people nowadays are so far removed from knowing what's happening close to the metal that they don't often realize you're essentially running thousands of lines of code to do something trivial as heavyweight libraries wrap everything up.
At a certain point, someone needs to be able to determine if the code is the reason your stuff is so damned slow, and if the bloat has gotten out of hand. Sometimes, you really do need to look at your own optimizing.
Well, you can put together a spreadsheet in a few hours.
What you're describing is likely months of custom development and design, and a whole new thing to maintain.
Spreadsheets are popular because they're easily deployed, don't require any extra licensing, and the people who know how to use them can likely do things with them that some of us would be astounded at.
I know people who use spreadsheets for pretty much everything, because it's available to them readily, and they've been using them for a long time.
It's all well and good to suggest that they use a full-fledged database -- but in reality, they can probably get something useful in a few days for a fraction of the cost.
It sounds like in this instance, the code was just horribly inefficient.
They can, but has Motorolla signed up for this with every cell-phone provider?
I think the more likely thing is that Motorolla added shit which phones home with your data, and you pay for it.
I suspect it goes through an inverter just like everything else.
My computer is hooked up to a UPS, and the UPS is feeding it AC power. I'm pretty sure this is a solved problem.
Well, what was 'good' for shareholders was getting a product out the door, and not spending all of that money on implementing any actual security.
If there's no penalty for not having good security and/or encryption, why would a company spend money on it? From that perspective, it would be bad for shareholders and business.
If you make it costly to have data breaches, it becomes good for shareholders to implement security.
But, as a general rule, companies only do the 'right' thing when they have no choice, or if it's advantageous to them to do it. Which is why if we didn't have pollution laws, companies would just dump toxic crap wherever they felt.
Of course you do, if it's sending data from your phone, that's part of your monthly usage.
Yeah, and then the only company you need to worry about not trusting is Google.
Unfortunately, even on a stock Nexus tablet, Google pushes very hard to force you to use their stuff, and actually signed me up for a You Tube account when I launched the app, even though I don't want a You Tube account and never got asked.
I'm pretty sure we're screwed no matter what we run these days.
How about this?
They've gone way beyond authorized access, and are collecting information they have no business accessing.
But somehow those EULAs magically give them the legal right to do anything they want to.
I'm sure they feel they can write anything they want in an EULA, but I can't see how this is legal.
This is actively taking your data for their own purposes, and should be something with criminal penalties.
And Google recently added terms to the permission for the Android keyboard update which wants more access to your personal information -- forcing me to conclude that any device you buy these days is actively working against you, and is best kept in airplane mode as much as possible.
You don't own and control it -- the assholes in marketing do.
At this rate, the only safe way to run your computer is when it's disconnected from the network.
Microsoft isn't a trustworthy entity.
I also predict this will run afoul of European data laws, and any country with privacy laws should be looking closely at this.
Yeah, that was what prompted me to disconnect mine from the network too, and even though they've backed down and require only one-time, I'm still not buying the new one.
But if Microsoft is going to start doing this stuff in the core OS, they're really going to further piss off their customers. The last thing I want is advertising embedded in the OS -- because you pretty much have to conclude the OS is spying on you.
In doing this, Windows has more or less become something you simply can't trust, because those advertising hooks will pretty much be into everything.
Not if it isn't going to give me the ability to disable javascript it isn't.
Not even a little. If I can't decide what will and won't run on the browser, I won't be using it.