Re:2012: The beginning of the end
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Introducing SlashBI
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Eventually Slashdot will be nothing but a brand; a collection of minimally-viewed tech blogs that are finally sold to a media company and rolled into their large collection of robotic advertising delivery channels.
I think that's been happening for a while now, to be honest.
What makes a Playbook a better choice than an Android tablet or an iPad? I know nothing about them.
In all honesty, I wouldn't say the Playbook is a better choice.
I bought one for the wife for Christmas. It locks up, hangs, freezes, hasn't got all that many apps she's interested in, and generally seems a bit more of a nuisance than it ought to be. It doesn't always want to see the wifi, and every now and then locks up so badly she just puts it on to charge and walks away from it.
I'm actually embarrassed every time she glares at me when it crashes on her. She is getting frustrated and fed up with it.
By way of comparison, my iPad has been exceedingly usable and stable in the two years I've had it -- I also know people with Android tabs they're happy with, and a couple with HP tabs that don't find them too bad either.
YMMV, but my wife is quite underwhelmed with her Playbook so far. I think the latest OS update has made her even more grumpy.:(
Sound like the patent trolls are funding lobbiests.
The problem, of course, is that it seems to be working. With the lobbyists in turn funding Congress.
Congress is basically rubber stamping things from their 'real' constituents and letting them write drafts of laws that they never read.
American government is now basically a paid arm of corporations to help further stack the deck in their favor.
Which, of course, the American government then tries to export to the rest of the world via things like ACTA -- it won't be long before the US is demanding the rest of the world honors these secret patents so people can be sued for violating patents they're not allowed to know about.
Since you were too lazy to comprehend what I wrote, or google what I wrote here is a decent summary of some good work:
It's not my job to research your assertions. You made 'em, you back 'em up.
CISPA is terrible legislation as far as I am concerned, but don't shit on a legitimate and valuable organization because you don't understand it. Sacrificing mod points, because this is an organization that helps more than it hurts.
You've still failed to say in what way you believe a non-profit conduit somehow absolves these organizations of the legal issues surrounding the use and collection of this data. In fact, you even said:
I can't legally provide those to the FBI for both legal and regulatory reasons.
So if you can't provide that information to the FBI for legal and regulatory reasons, how the hell do you share it with the FBI just because a notional not-for-profit is involved if its primary function is to share information with the FBI? I utterly fail to see how you're doing anything other than sharing information with the FBI that you're not supposed to.
Are you anonymizing the data? Putting it through any layers whereby the FBI has less information than if they had it directly? Or are you just handing over the information to a not-for-profit that you're not supposed to give to the FBI so they can give it to the FBI?
Sorry, but since I don't trust any of the three letter agencies not to be extending their mandate and skirting around laws (which the tone of TFA seems pretty clear on), without understanding how this arrangement is anything other than a means to circumvent the law, I'm afraid I'm going to have to conclude that it is.
This is an absurd characterization of the NCFTA and the work they do.
Well, then, by all means, if you have any actual facts, go ahead and share.
So far, you're a random person on the internet claiming something with nothing to back it up.
Conveniently, the FBI has a unit, the Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit, stationed in the NCFTAâ(TM)s office. Companies can share information with the 501(c)6 non-profit that they would be wary of (or prohibited from) sharing directly with the FBI.
So if someone would be legally prohibited from sharing this information directly with the FBI, tell us how, exactly, a non-profit set up to circumvent this is a good thing for anybody? They get the data via some mechanism which magically makes the legal requirements go away?
âoeWeâ(TM)re not in DC. Weâ(TM)re in Pittsburgh. Weâ(TM)re off the Beltway radar,â says Plesko. âoeSince weâ(TM)re a non-profit, we donâ(TM)t get called in to do briefings on the Hill. We donâ(TM)t have marketing and PR though we do occasionally get thanked in FBI press releases.â
Oh, I see, since they're off the radar, they're not subject to oversight. That makes me feel a lot better. It's always good to have organizations with no oversight gathering information about people.
To me this sounds like a bunch of shady dealing, and since you've given nothing to back up any of what you say, I'll continue to believe that.
So they're going to exploit a legal loophole to violate the intent of the law.
This is truly a sad thing to hear. Hopefully a court will rule that this is expressly illegal and revokes the charitable status -- this is just doing an end-run around the law.
Brilliant, we'll set up a charity which can be used to facilitate giving data to the FBI they'd otherwise be legally prevented from having.
And although I do agree that there are a fair number of stories on this site regarding action against whistleblowers, does that mean that each story regarding the hunt for whistleblowers should be discussed here, or just the ones that are nerd based?
Don't know, I don't set editorial policy at Slashdot.:-P
But, many of us are quite interested in such stories in terms of the societal context. Admittedly, it might be a bit of a stretch for Slashdot though since there's little connection to technology.
Although the story is interesting, this is not the place for it.
I don't know, the extent to which organizations want to track down and silence whistle blowers is kind of interesting and apropos to other things we see.
They don't seem to be denying the allegations, just trying to shut them up.
Since it's still people involved, it's not a huge stretch to think there might be some corruption going on.
But, it shouldn't be subject to patent protection, and their patents tend to be dubious at best.
Unfortunately, this is the situation we find ourselves in. Everything is patented, no matter how absurd, and companies are basically performing rent-seeking by suing everyone who makes something resembling one of their "existing, often poorly implemented, inventions" (which as often as not are just copies of other ideas which have been around a while).
The problem is the absurdity of the patent system, much more so than any of the players. They're all playing the same game, and nobody wins in the end except for the big companies.
How much is Microsoft making off every Android phone again?
I don't see how any company could possibly not be getting embroiled in this unless you simply roll over and cough up a percentage of your earnings to any schmuck who comes along and says he's got a patent.
A password generated using an externally visible attribute of the device is pure incompetence and making stupid decisions.
This isn't about Beardo going away and losing the password, it's about someone making one of those shockingly stupid decisions about convenience over security which leads to security through obscurity.
As TFS says, this is bordering on a trivial exploit since you can likely hack any and all devices running this OS merely by figuring out its MAC address.
What's more, researchers say, for years the company hasn't bothered to warn the power utilities, military facilities, and municipal traffic departments using the industrial-strength gear that the account can give attackers the means to sabotage operations that affect the safety of huge populations of people.
This is just blatantly moronic. If you're marketing yourself for "mission critical", don't do something this stupid.
Wow, you bought a brand new, really high end machine, and the latest OS works well on it?
Who woulda thunk it!
That wasn't my point -- a lot of the kvetching about Vista I've heard has been about how people didn't like the GUI, didn't like UAC, or generally found it to be substandard in a lot of ways.
It's entirely possible that throwing it at big hardware solves all of the problems most people had, but the resources specifically weren't what I've seen most of the bitching about.
Windows XP is the first stable OS to come out of that company, so I had high hopes they had turned around... but then I experienced Vista.:-(
So, apropos to nothing and totally off topic... I must be the only person who has had a positive Vista experience.
It got put onto a brand new machine bought specifically for it, had loads of resources (8GB RAM, quad core, started with 2x1TB drives), and it has been really stable. I even found the UAT thing only asked me for the password when I would expect to be asked for it.
Considering how long I spent hating Microsoft, even I have to admit that, for me, Vista has been a very good OS.
You do know what a scraper is, right? It's a script. An automated script. One that no human generally deals with (unless it's broken).
As a matter of fact, I do. But oddly enough, yesterday's Dilbert cartoon is apropos.
If something is scraping it, it is available to be read by humans.
Now, if they tell us that under no circumstances will any entity ever peek into my data then I'd believe it to be secure. Well, even then, I'm not sure I'd "believe" that.
Otherwise, it's being opened and read and cataloged and indexed. I don't care if it's a scraper, or an intern at that point. You may see a magical difference between those, but I don't.
and also I believe them when they say no human will see my stuff
I'm increasingly unsure of that. We know they scrape the contents of your emails to decide what ads to show you. We know they keep track of your browsing history as much as they can, and aggregate it across sites.
I'm just not convinced they wouldn't be peeking inside.
Then again, the only stuff I'm going to keep in the cloud is just temporary personal with no real need to have a whole lot of privacy. Anything work related, I simply won't put it into the cloud -- because for anything business confidential, I don't trust the cloud providers at all. And, more importantly, neither does my employer.
Can we 'regedit' tvs so we can use our own splash logos?
Oh, man, combine that with goatse and malware... imagine the hilarity of your grandmother or someone getting that every time they turn on their TV, or if it *only* shows that. *shudders*
Unfortunately, connecting everything to the internet seems like this is kind of a logical hack to occur. Especially if companies are going to be half assed about validating inputs and the like.
I wear as much tinfoil as the next guy, but not all law enforcement requests are criminal investigations.
Yes, but the ones that are criminal investigations should sure as hell be subject to the laws governing such things.
In this case, unlimited access to the data, anytime they want, for any reason is totally bypassing the 4th amendment.
Do you really want the cops to have to wake up a judge at 3am when your teenage daughter has gone missing after complaining about a stalker?
Oh, won't someone please think of the children. It's vital we all give up our rights to protect the children.
The reality is, there needs to be something here somewhere between complete and open access on any whim of law enforcement, and ensuring they're not bypassing all of the court oversight that is supposed to be in place for these things.
Because, it's not unprecedented to cops to use these things to look into what their spouse or ex is doing. This overly friendly working relationship is a recipe for all sorts of abuses and violations of due process -- both by individuals, and government in general.
A free society can't really stand for police getting full access to everything about them without some oversight unless it wants to find itself living in a very repressive environment.
Very sad that America seems to be forgetting this. Terrorism and protecting the children is being used as an excuse to knock down every legal barrier, and then start applying that as general, arbitrary surveillance for pretty much everything. Pretty soon, they'll be using it for speeding tickets and jay walking.
It's not like we make as much money as atheletes, so where do programmers go when they are 40?
Consulting or professional services. No, really.
As much as product-oriented software houses may prefer to have younger programmers for whatever reason, people who have been in the industry for a while have a lot of breadth and depth in terms of domain expertise and the like.
In terms of actually helping to implement the things in the real world, companies tend to find themselves needing a broader context for these things. With the added benefit you can roll up your sleeves and write code as needed.
Sometimes a developer only sees things from a given perspective, which doesn't always translate into the ability to help businesses actually do things. Not all developers have yet learned how to interact with non-technical people.
Having 'graduated' from a software development company several years ago, there's a market for people with a good general grounding in computers who also have some domain expertise in one or more areas.
The 'grown up' skills like being able to conduct yourself nicely in meetings, work with actual end users and not be a condescending prat, and be able to see the big picture of why someone is doing something are quite marketable.
There is life after code. It can be quite rewarding. That good, solid technical grounding is still a valuable skill as long as you have some of the soft skills to back it up.
I find the statement "... or should they consider the realities of science, where people advocate for their own theories far more than they question them?" kind of leading and biased in its own right. To be sure researchers will advocate their theories, but that does not mean they don't question them. Someone has a chip on their shoulder.
Well, when you're talking about someone giving scientific evidence in court, you need to consider if they're testifying in favor of something which isn't just "researchers advocating their theories", or a self-serving but controversial point of view.
If an expert witness is saying something which isn't widely accepted by the scientific community (say, Bigfoot), versus something which is widely accepted (say, Gravity) then you need to look at it differently. What does this guy have to gain by this? Is he truly objective? Is he actually qualified?
I think the crux here is that the court should learn to recognize that something isn't scientifically true just because one side or the other can produce an 'expert scientician' who says so. And if you have a scientist advocating for a position which the rest of the scientific community strongly disagrees with, the 'expert' in question may really be little more than a paid shill. (That's not to say they're automatically a paid shill, but you do need to ask yourself if they might be, and if they have anything to gain from this.)
If you have an expert witness claiming that masturbation really does cause blindness, then maybe you need to look at the motives of your expert witness. They might be merely serving their own agenda (or paycheck).
Kind of like those "think tanks" which will produce papers to support the views of their sponsors so people can't quite figure out what it 'true' and what isn't. It's not good science, but it sure can muddy the waters if you can produce two sets of experts saying entirely opposite things. But, hey, you have your expert and we have ours, and after all, science is just opinion, right?
If the courts can't evaluate one expert versus another (or even the validity of a single expert), they stand a good chance of being hoodwinked.
Well, Leisure Suit Larry came out in 1987 -- I was in high school. I also saw it again while I was in university.
Maybe the jokes were old and dated even then? It wasn't that I didn't understand it, it just wasn't funny to me.
Leonard Part 6 wasn't funny either.
Maybe I needed to have actually snorted cocaine off someone's tits in Studio 54 to get the humor. But I should think if you were doing that, you wouldn't need Leisure Suit Larry.
Can a bunch of teenagers legally sign up for something like this?
They can't sign contracts, and they're legally too young to truly be able to consent to something like this. And who knows if their parents truly understand the ramifications of this.
This sounds like it might be in a very grey area, if not outright questionable. Definitely on the creepy side to me.
Hmm thats curious. I should check it out on my Wii. Is that with WiiConnect on or off?
I seem to remember that with WiiConnect on, the damned thing never actually turned off, and it made the blinken light keep pulsing.
That lasted about an hour or so for me... having my Wii be able to tell me the current weather didn't really provide any meaningful benefit to me. So I didn't see the point in having it be essentially always on. I use my PC for that.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's been happening for a while now, to be honest.
In all honesty, I wouldn't say the Playbook is a better choice.
I bought one for the wife for Christmas. It locks up, hangs, freezes, hasn't got all that many apps she's interested in, and generally seems a bit more of a nuisance than it ought to be. It doesn't always want to see the wifi, and every now and then locks up so badly she just puts it on to charge and walks away from it.
I'm actually embarrassed every time she glares at me when it crashes on her. She is getting frustrated and fed up with it.
By way of comparison, my iPad has been exceedingly usable and stable in the two years I've had it -- I also know people with Android tabs they're happy with, and a couple with HP tabs that don't find them too bad either.
YMMV, but my wife is quite underwhelmed with her Playbook so far. I think the latest OS update has made her even more grumpy. :(
The problem, of course, is that it seems to be working. With the lobbyists in turn funding Congress.
Congress is basically rubber stamping things from their 'real' constituents and letting them write drafts of laws that they never read.
American government is now basically a paid arm of corporations to help further stack the deck in their favor.
Which, of course, the American government then tries to export to the rest of the world via things like ACTA -- it won't be long before the US is demanding the rest of the world honors these secret patents so people can be sued for violating patents they're not allowed to know about.
It's not my job to research your assertions. You made 'em, you back 'em up.
You've still failed to say in what way you believe a non-profit conduit somehow absolves these organizations of the legal issues surrounding the use and collection of this data. In fact, you even said:
So if you can't provide that information to the FBI for legal and regulatory reasons, how the hell do you share it with the FBI just because a notional not-for-profit is involved if its primary function is to share information with the FBI? I utterly fail to see how you're doing anything other than sharing information with the FBI that you're not supposed to.
Are you anonymizing the data? Putting it through any layers whereby the FBI has less information than if they had it directly? Or are you just handing over the information to a not-for-profit that you're not supposed to give to the FBI so they can give it to the FBI?
Sorry, but since I don't trust any of the three letter agencies not to be extending their mandate and skirting around laws (which the tone of TFA seems pretty clear on), without understanding how this arrangement is anything other than a means to circumvent the law, I'm afraid I'm going to have to conclude that it is.
Whereas the Microsoft version will just take you crashing off a cliff and burst into flames when you start the car -- skipping directly to death. ;-)
I believe that would be "shearing the sheep for Wall St.".
Well, then, by all means, if you have any actual facts, go ahead and share.
So far, you're a random person on the internet claiming something with nothing to back it up.
So if someone would be legally prohibited from sharing this information directly with the FBI, tell us how, exactly, a non-profit set up to circumvent this is a good thing for anybody? They get the data via some mechanism which magically makes the legal requirements go away?
Oh, I see, since they're off the radar, they're not subject to oversight. That makes me feel a lot better. It's always good to have organizations with no oversight gathering information about people.
To me this sounds like a bunch of shady dealing, and since you've given nothing to back up any of what you say, I'll continue to believe that.
So they're going to exploit a legal loophole to violate the intent of the law.
This is truly a sad thing to hear. Hopefully a court will rule that this is expressly illegal and revokes the charitable status -- this is just doing an end-run around the law.
Brilliant, we'll set up a charity which can be used to facilitate giving data to the FBI they'd otherwise be legally prevented from having.
Very sad. How do those freedom fries taste, guys?
Bah, so did Saruman. Look how that turned out.
Don't know, I don't set editorial policy at Slashdot. :-P
But, many of us are quite interested in such stories in terms of the societal context. Admittedly, it might be a bit of a stretch for Slashdot though since there's little connection to technology.
I don't know, the extent to which organizations want to track down and silence whistle blowers is kind of interesting and apropos to other things we see.
They don't seem to be denying the allegations, just trying to shut them up.
Since it's still people involved, it's not a huge stretch to think there might be some corruption going on.
Unfortunately, this is the situation we find ourselves in. Everything is patented, no matter how absurd, and companies are basically performing rent-seeking by suing everyone who makes something resembling one of their "existing, often poorly implemented, inventions" (which as often as not are just copies of other ideas which have been around a while).
The problem is the absurdity of the patent system, much more so than any of the players. They're all playing the same game, and nobody wins in the end except for the big companies.
How much is Microsoft making off every Android phone again?
I don't see how any company could possibly not be getting embroiled in this unless you simply roll over and cough up a percentage of your earnings to any schmuck who comes along and says he's got a patent.
And here I thought that was a normal Friday night in Texas. ;-)
I think you're giving them far too much credit.
A password generated using an externally visible attribute of the device is pure incompetence and making stupid decisions.
This isn't about Beardo going away and losing the password, it's about someone making one of those shockingly stupid decisions about convenience over security which leads to security through obscurity.
As TFS says, this is bordering on a trivial exploit since you can likely hack any and all devices running this OS merely by figuring out its MAC address.
This is just blatantly moronic. If you're marketing yourself for "mission critical", don't do something this stupid.
That wasn't my point -- a lot of the kvetching about Vista I've heard has been about how people didn't like the GUI, didn't like UAC, or generally found it to be substandard in a lot of ways.
It's entirely possible that throwing it at big hardware solves all of the problems most people had, but the resources specifically weren't what I've seen most of the bitching about.
So, apropos to nothing and totally off topic ... I must be the only person who has had a positive Vista experience.
It got put onto a brand new machine bought specifically for it, had loads of resources (8GB RAM, quad core, started with 2x1TB drives), and it has been really stable. I even found the UAT thing only asked me for the password when I would expect to be asked for it.
Considering how long I spent hating Microsoft, even I have to admit that, for me, Vista has been a very good OS.
As a matter of fact, I do. But oddly enough, yesterday's Dilbert cartoon is apropos.
If something is scraping it, it is available to be read by humans.
Now, if they tell us that under no circumstances will any entity ever peek into my data then I'd believe it to be secure. Well, even then, I'm not sure I'd "believe" that.
Otherwise, it's being opened and read and cataloged and indexed. I don't care if it's a scraper, or an intern at that point. You may see a magical difference between those, but I don't.
I'm increasingly unsure of that. We know they scrape the contents of your emails to decide what ads to show you. We know they keep track of your browsing history as much as they can, and aggregate it across sites.
I'm just not convinced they wouldn't be peeking inside.
Then again, the only stuff I'm going to keep in the cloud is just temporary personal with no real need to have a whole lot of privacy. Anything work related, I simply won't put it into the cloud -- because for anything business confidential, I don't trust the cloud providers at all. And, more importantly, neither does my employer.
Oh, man, combine that with goatse and malware ... imagine the hilarity of your grandmother or someone getting that every time they turn on their TV, or if it *only* shows that. *shudders*
Unfortunately, connecting everything to the internet seems like this is kind of a logical hack to occur. Especially if companies are going to be half assed about validating inputs and the like.
Yes, but the ones that are criminal investigations should sure as hell be subject to the laws governing such things.
In this case, unlimited access to the data, anytime they want, for any reason is totally bypassing the 4th amendment.
Oh, won't someone please think of the children. It's vital we all give up our rights to protect the children.
The reality is, there needs to be something here somewhere between complete and open access on any whim of law enforcement, and ensuring they're not bypassing all of the court oversight that is supposed to be in place for these things.
Because, it's not unprecedented to cops to use these things to look into what their spouse or ex is doing. This overly friendly working relationship is a recipe for all sorts of abuses and violations of due process -- both by individuals, and government in general.
A free society can't really stand for police getting full access to everything about them without some oversight unless it wants to find itself living in a very repressive environment.
Very sad that America seems to be forgetting this. Terrorism and protecting the children is being used as an excuse to knock down every legal barrier, and then start applying that as general, arbitrary surveillance for pretty much everything. Pretty soon, they'll be using it for speeding tickets and jay walking.
Consulting or professional services. No, really.
As much as product-oriented software houses may prefer to have younger programmers for whatever reason, people who have been in the industry for a while have a lot of breadth and depth in terms of domain expertise and the like.
In terms of actually helping to implement the things in the real world, companies tend to find themselves needing a broader context for these things. With the added benefit you can roll up your sleeves and write code as needed.
Sometimes a developer only sees things from a given perspective, which doesn't always translate into the ability to help businesses actually do things. Not all developers have yet learned how to interact with non-technical people.
Having 'graduated' from a software development company several years ago, there's a market for people with a good general grounding in computers who also have some domain expertise in one or more areas.
The 'grown up' skills like being able to conduct yourself nicely in meetings, work with actual end users and not be a condescending prat, and be able to see the big picture of why someone is doing something are quite marketable.
There is life after code. It can be quite rewarding. That good, solid technical grounding is still a valuable skill as long as you have some of the soft skills to back it up.
Well, when you're talking about someone giving scientific evidence in court, you need to consider if they're testifying in favor of something which isn't just "researchers advocating their theories", or a self-serving but controversial point of view.
If an expert witness is saying something which isn't widely accepted by the scientific community (say, Bigfoot), versus something which is widely accepted (say, Gravity) then you need to look at it differently. What does this guy have to gain by this? Is he truly objective? Is he actually qualified?
I think the crux here is that the court should learn to recognize that something isn't scientifically true just because one side or the other can produce an 'expert scientician' who says so. And if you have a scientist advocating for a position which the rest of the scientific community strongly disagrees with, the 'expert' in question may really be little more than a paid shill. (That's not to say they're automatically a paid shill, but you do need to ask yourself if they might be, and if they have anything to gain from this.)
If you have an expert witness claiming that masturbation really does cause blindness, then maybe you need to look at the motives of your expert witness. They might be merely serving their own agenda (or paycheck).
Kind of like those "think tanks" which will produce papers to support the views of their sponsors so people can't quite figure out what it 'true' and what isn't. It's not good science, but it sure can muddy the waters if you can produce two sets of experts saying entirely opposite things. But, hey, you have your expert and we have ours, and after all, science is just opinion, right?
If the courts can't evaluate one expert versus another (or even the validity of a single expert), they stand a good chance of being hoodwinked.
Well, Leisure Suit Larry came out in 1987 -- I was in high school. I also saw it again while I was in university.
Maybe the jokes were old and dated even then? It wasn't that I didn't understand it, it just wasn't funny to me.
Leonard Part 6 wasn't funny either.
Maybe I needed to have actually snorted cocaine off someone's tits in Studio 54 to get the humor. But I should think if you were doing that, you wouldn't need Leisure Suit Larry.
Can a bunch of teenagers legally sign up for something like this?
They can't sign contracts, and they're legally too young to truly be able to consent to something like this. And who knows if their parents truly understand the ramifications of this.
This sounds like it might be in a very grey area, if not outright questionable. Definitely on the creepy side to me.
I seem to remember that with WiiConnect on, the damned thing never actually turned off, and it made the blinken light keep pulsing.
That lasted about an hour or so for me ... having my Wii be able to tell me the current weather didn't really provide any meaningful benefit to me. So I didn't see the point in having it be essentially always on. I use my PC for that.