The press and public aren't the only ones being conned. AT&T has consistently used its phantom fiber deployment as a carrot on a stick with regulators, at one point threatening to stop making these barely-there investments unless regulators walked back net neutrality. AT&T backed off the claim when the FCC asked for hard data, but this kind of telecom theater works exceptionally well in state legislatures. Last week AT&T claimed net neutrality prevented them from innovating, and this week they're portraying themselves as the innovator of the century (even though the only actual innovation here is in misleading PR).
See, they're not building very much, but they're using it to claim how they'd be forced to stop spending money on improving their infrastructure if those pesky regulators made them follow any rules.
It's more like they're picking the low hanging fruit along the side of a road, but are claiming to be building orchards and highways.
They're dinosaurs sitting on a business model by which they keep charging more money for the same thing, while ultimately NOT investing in new infrastructure and instead acting like they deserve money for doing nothing.
What you're missing is they're not really building it. They're adding a small amount of capacity in places where it is super easy and to do it because someone already built the infrastructure, and then pretending they're some kind of cutting edge innovators of the network of the future.
So, just how much of the money they've collected and said it's for improving infrastructure has actually been used to that end, and how much has just been skimmed off as profits to ensure the stock stays high and executive bonuses keep going up?
When they don't invest in real infrastructure and adding new capacity, it's just a shell game to pretend they're not just leaving the existing stuff to rot.
Here's the secret of the new economy: you want to be an owner, not an employee.
Oddly enough, both Adam Smith and Karl Marx sorted that fact out a long time ago.
Doesn't mean you need to participate in the race to the bottom so some asshole of a CEO can cash out.
I look at this entire "sharing economy" as people getting screwed over for chump change to make someone else rich.
Fuck that.
This is just taking every advance we made in employment over the last century or so and tossing it out and saying that it's so damned important that some douchebag profit we should all be willing to sacrifice ourselves to that end.
then its just another company trying to exploit low wage labor to produce cookie-cutter products on the cheap
Go with that one.
That's the entire business model... get rich by letting some schmuck compete to do the job as cheaply as possible. If you're really lucky, you go IPO and cash out.
The people who do the work? They collect a little table scraps and hope it gets better.
This is the new trend... piece work, with no employment, benefits, or stability.
This "sharing economy" bullshit is about letting the company who goes IPO to make money, while relying on a bunch of people they treat as disposable do the work for them.
So, yeah, you're not an employee in this scenario, and you never will be. And meanwhile some asshole of a CEO makes millions of dollars for exploiting you.
Doesn't sound like a fair deal to me. Not sure why everyone is so keen to participate in stuff like this.
Are people getting dumber or am I getting less tolerant?
It can be two things!;-)
Of course, the reality is accessing the internet is far easier than understanding the security issues, since people don't seem to be paranoid enough by default. Far too many people just think "oh, it's the internet, it's a warm and inviting place".
Anything which can be scammed, will be scammed. The internet just magnifies this by a zillion.
If people had to be as paranoid in real life as they need to be on the internet, they'd never leave the house.
I'll broaden that to pretty much the entire intertubes... as much as it's a useful thing, it's also full of shady players who are trying to make a buck.
From the ad agencies to people trying to sell me in-app purchases, I pretty much don't trust any of them to have any financial impact on me... because I assume they're either all crooked, or are likely to be hacked.
I pretty much start with the default position of assuming everything on the internet is sketchy these days, and only enable the bare minimum of trust I need to make something work if it actually has benefit to me and is an entity who is fairly likely to be somewhat safe to trust a little.
These types of attacks account for 45% of all malware infections and are usually carried out through infected ads in so-called malvertising campaigns.
And this shit is why I will never, ever be willing to treat ads as anything but malicious and dangerous affronts to my privacy and security.
I lump all analytics and ads into the same bucket: evil greedy bastards who I will never trust, never allow to run scripts, and whose content I will block as long as I have the means. Because, quite frankly, I don't see the difference between the "legitimate" ones and the "shady" ones.
The only way to win is not even play. Once you start running blocking stuff and realize the amount of shit embedded in every web page, you just treat them all as parasites or shit on your shoe: you remove them with extreme prejudice.
Why, yes, the Really Smart Guy who got his PhD when he was 20 and subsequently created Mathematica and then the Wolfram language... he made something intended to help people learn stuff.
I would say the Hermione Grangers of the world is probably fairly apt... he sure as hell wasn't targeting the morons of the world.
Well, we are carbon life forms and we are looking at the situation from our perspective. I would say the chances of these simulations being accurate are vanishingly small. Do we REALLY understand how and where life forms? Being carbon-based, is it really realistic to assume any and all life is like us, formed like us (even if our other assumptions about our own formation are correct)?
Someone asks this question every time this topic comes up.
Of course we don't understand how life forms. Yes, it's possible life exists in some form we can't even guess at.
Now, here's the rub: we have no idea how we would look for life which is fundamentally different from is. None, nada, zip. We can look for conditions we could exist in, because we know what to look for. What we can't do is imagine how in hell we'd look for a "silicon-based Dactarian shit worm".
You simply can't design any meaningful scientific experiment which says "and now we will try to identify possible places where a silicon-based Dactarian shit work could exist". Because we have no idea under what conditions it would thrive in, or how it could possibly exist.
Looking for conditions which would be favorable to forms of life we have no idea how would work or exist isn't science, it's science fiction -- because anything you tried to look for is just pulling random ideas out of your ass.
So what actual scientists have done is say "well, let's not concern ourselves with making stuff up and looking for it, let's look for what we do know."
Because it's the only thing we can do.
Do you really expect a "very accurate simulation" based on things which are at best speculative fiction? Because that's what looking for any form of life which isn't carbon based is. But it sure aint science.
How can any of us trust that when Microsoft puts out patches they're not also saying "fuck it, while we're here we'll just tinker with a few things and add stuff we've wanted for a while"?
Microsoft are being such bastards about shoving Windows 10 up our collective asses I'm afraid at this point Microsoft has to be treated as a hostile and un-trusted entity -- they've pretty much decided that furthering their own interests is compatible with the update system which is supposed to provide us security.
We don't trust you didn't write something horribly insecure, we don't trust that you aren't sneaking something in unrelated to security, and quire frankly we don't trust that you're going to do a good job of fixing these problems.
It always seems to me they just leave them alone to become feral little beasts that everyone else has to put up with.
I can't tell you how many people I have seen who can barely control their own kid in public because it's a screeching howling little ball of evil which won't take no for an answer, and that's while they're still young enough to be in a stroller. I can only imagine the vicious little psychopaths by the time they're a few years older.
Then again, I don't have or want kids, so maybe I'm just a little biased.
But I figure by the time you're begging, pleading, and resorting to bribery, you have already lost the battle and your kids are going to walk all over you for the rest of their lives.
And then of course there's the fact that a lot of the people I see with kids were left to be feral little balls of evil by their own parents and haven't got the slightest idea of what to do.
You need a license to own a dog, but any moron can have a kid.
Yeah, and everyone is going to cause the same class of problems, have the same kinds of failure modes and corner cases, and they're all going to throw their hands up in the air and say "oh, I have no idea what to do, you drive meat puppet".
In the early 80s everyone was working against a fairly well described architecture for the PC, and ultimately used the same parts or licensed fabrication of their own piece.
For a driver-less car system, having a bunch of companies develop these and hope they work feels like it will end up being the wild west of hoping you don't encounter a random failure mode at any given time.
There really needs to be some level of standards and certification applied here -- or the driver-less cars are going to make the same kind of stupid mistakes as things like the IoT are making now. Companies will be lazy, take shortcuts, miss some things entirely... and it will be the consumers who have to buy them and field test them.
The idea of a bunch of companies trying to solve this problem, and a bunch of cheap knock-offs and other bits of corner cutting being responsible for driving us around is kind of scary.
Do they get an income from their online activities, do you know why and how? PORN.
If your kid is making income online from porn, then you have other issues you should be worried about.
Other than that, these warning signs probably describe the teenage years of a large chunk of people on Slashdot.
They basically say "if your teenager uses a computer, is moody, and keeps odd hours you should totally report him as a criminal just in case". The entire thing sounds like it was written by some clueless idiot who doesn't know anything about the life of a teenage nerd.
It's really long on hysteria, and really short on substance.
Business interaction isn't nearly as hard as say high school, or social gatherings, because business interactions have specific enumerated rules, that have been written down, and are generally agreed upon.
LOL, OK, on behalf of those of us without a clinical diagnosis, but craptacular human interaction skills... for the love of god, please tell us where these rules are written down.
Nobody told me there was a frickin' manual for this stuff.
At this point can we trust VW when they say "it's OK, we're fine, nothing bad happened"?
I'm inclined to think no.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But this isn't something which you can just take them at their word without verifying... they've already lost credibility, which means they don't get it back just by telling us it's all OK.
Essentially this boils down to the police lack the skills and sophistication of the people they're trying to stop, and in the process they're getting their asses handed to them and losing the money they have as bait.
You have to admire the audacity, but you can't go around thinking law enforcement has the right skillset to fight these people on their own turf.
In an ever on-going arms race, the bad guys are more numerous, likely have more resources and time, and are quite motivated.
I mean, it's not like in the real world you'd grab an officer, give him some slouchy shorts, a wallet chain and a beanie cap and send him in to pretend like he fits in with who you're looking for.
So, yeah, organized crooks using the intertubes know more about the intertubes than the police trying to stop them. Film at 11.
I absolutely LOVE the Pig Alert... it's just so damned hilarious in a vaguely kind of cyberpunk sort of way.
So, new CEO from Google comes in, sucks up a huge salary, drives Yahoo further into the ground, and is still there after almost four years.
Welcome to the world of CEOs, where competence and results have nothing at all to do with how much damned money you get paid.
I don't think she's a plant, I think Yahoo was a company which was far too screwed to readily turn itself around, and they've utterly failed to do it.
Inability of a CEO to turn around a company which has been floundering and lurching around for years doesn't necessitate a conspiracy. I think it points to the fact that people act like CEOs have any actual idea of what they're doing.
I mean, I can incompetently manage Yahoo for half the money.
Either because people don't agree with your politics, or your religion, or your choice of text editor, or flavor of ice cream.
I consider people who want to resort to censorship to be essentially morally bankrupt assholes.
But then, this is Eric Schmidt. So I already considered him one.
I cringe at how readily Western society is prepared to become unhinged and start throwing away our freedoms in order to claim to be protecting our freedoms.
Beware the guy who wants to cut through such things in order to achieve their agenda. Because in the end they'll stop at nothing and utterly fail to see the problems they're creating.
I don't want to live in a world where some asshole billionaire is the arbiter of what can and can't be said.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but it keeps corporate profits up, which is the only thing which matters.
The 'military industrial complex' has made vast sums of money over promising and under delivering.
Why stop now?
LOL ... Moo you damned torrenting cows, moo.
See, they're not building very much, but they're using it to claim how they'd be forced to stop spending money on improving their infrastructure if those pesky regulators made them follow any rules.
It's more like they're picking the low hanging fruit along the side of a road, but are claiming to be building orchards and highways.
They're dinosaurs sitting on a business model by which they keep charging more money for the same thing, while ultimately NOT investing in new infrastructure and instead acting like they deserve money for doing nothing.
What you're missing is they're not really building it. They're adding a small amount of capacity in places where it is super easy and to do it because someone already built the infrastructure, and then pretending they're some kind of cutting edge innovators of the network of the future.
So, just how much of the money they've collected and said it's for improving infrastructure has actually been used to that end, and how much has just been skimmed off as profits to ensure the stock stays high and executive bonuses keep going up?
When they don't invest in real infrastructure and adding new capacity, it's just a shell game to pretend they're not just leaving the existing stuff to rot.
Oddly enough, both Adam Smith and Karl Marx sorted that fact out a long time ago.
Doesn't mean you need to participate in the race to the bottom so some asshole of a CEO can cash out.
I look at this entire "sharing economy" as people getting screwed over for chump change to make someone else rich.
Fuck that.
This is just taking every advance we made in employment over the last century or so and tossing it out and saying that it's so damned important that some douchebag profit we should all be willing to sacrifice ourselves to that end.
Again, fuck that.
Go with that one.
That's the entire business model ... get rich by letting some schmuck compete to do the job as cheaply as possible. If you're really lucky, you go IPO and cash out.
The people who do the work? They collect a little table scraps and hope it gets better.
This is the new trend ... piece work, with no employment, benefits, or stability.
This "sharing economy" bullshit is about letting the company who goes IPO to make money, while relying on a bunch of people they treat as disposable do the work for them.
So, yeah, you're not an employee in this scenario, and you never will be. And meanwhile some asshole of a CEO makes millions of dollars for exploiting you.
Doesn't sound like a fair deal to me. Not sure why everyone is so keen to participate in stuff like this.
It can be two things! ;-)
Of course, the reality is accessing the internet is far easier than understanding the security issues, since people don't seem to be paranoid enough by default. Far too many people just think "oh, it's the internet, it's a warm and inviting place".
Anything which can be scammed, will be scammed. The internet just magnifies this by a zillion.
If people had to be as paranoid in real life as they need to be on the internet, they'd never leave the house.
I'll broaden that to pretty much the entire intertubes ... as much as it's a useful thing, it's also full of shady players who are trying to make a buck.
From the ad agencies to people trying to sell me in-app purchases, I pretty much don't trust any of them to have any financial impact on me ... because I assume they're either all crooked, or are likely to be hacked.
I pretty much start with the default position of assuming everything on the internet is sketchy these days, and only enable the bare minimum of trust I need to make something work if it actually has benefit to me and is an entity who is fairly likely to be somewhat safe to trust a little.
But my credit card? Not happening.
And this shit is why I will never, ever be willing to treat ads as anything but malicious and dangerous affronts to my privacy and security.
I lump all analytics and ads into the same bucket: evil greedy bastards who I will never trust, never allow to run scripts, and whose content I will block as long as I have the means. Because, quite frankly, I don't see the difference between the "legitimate" ones and the "shady" ones.
The only way to win is not even play. Once you start running blocking stuff and realize the amount of shit embedded in every web page, you just treat them all as parasites or shit on your shoe: you remove them with extreme prejudice.
Godwin'd from TFS ... now what?
So if you follow them after they move are you a Chubbie Chaser? ;-)
Odd for the French to not be surrendering. ;-)
Je blague, je blague ...
Why, yes, the Really Smart Guy who got his PhD when he was 20 and subsequently created Mathematica and then the Wolfram language ... he made something intended to help people learn stuff.
I would say the Hermione Grangers of the world is probably fairly apt ... he sure as hell wasn't targeting the morons of the world.
Someone asks this question every time this topic comes up.
Of course we don't understand how life forms. Yes, it's possible life exists in some form we can't even guess at.
Now, here's the rub: we have no idea how we would look for life which is fundamentally different from is. None, nada, zip. We can look for conditions we could exist in, because we know what to look for. What we can't do is imagine how in hell we'd look for a "silicon-based Dactarian shit worm".
You simply can't design any meaningful scientific experiment which says "and now we will try to identify possible places where a silicon-based Dactarian shit work could exist". Because we have no idea under what conditions it would thrive in, or how it could possibly exist.
Looking for conditions which would be favorable to forms of life we have no idea how would work or exist isn't science, it's science fiction -- because anything you tried to look for is just pulling random ideas out of your ass.
So what actual scientists have done is say "well, let's not concern ourselves with making stuff up and looking for it, let's look for what we do know."
Because it's the only thing we can do.
Do you really expect a "very accurate simulation" based on things which are at best speculative fiction? Because that's what looking for any form of life which isn't carbon based is. But it sure aint science.
Oh, sorry, Microsoft has decided it is their computer, and you may only use it according to how they see fit.
They don't give a crap about what you want here, they're just going to automate this stuff to take away all the scary bits.
Apparently you're not qualified to concern yourself with such things.
How can any of us trust that when Microsoft puts out patches they're not also saying "fuck it, while we're here we'll just tinker with a few things and add stuff we've wanted for a while"?
Microsoft are being such bastards about shoving Windows 10 up our collective asses I'm afraid at this point Microsoft has to be treated as a hostile and un-trusted entity -- they've pretty much decided that furthering their own interests is compatible with the update system which is supposed to provide us security.
We don't trust you didn't write something horribly insecure, we don't trust that you aren't sneaking something in unrelated to security, and quire frankly we don't trust that you're going to do a good job of fixing these problems.
Do people still do that?
It always seems to me they just leave them alone to become feral little beasts that everyone else has to put up with.
I can't tell you how many people I have seen who can barely control their own kid in public because it's a screeching howling little ball of evil which won't take no for an answer, and that's while they're still young enough to be in a stroller. I can only imagine the vicious little psychopaths by the time they're a few years older.
Then again, I don't have or want kids, so maybe I'm just a little biased.
But I figure by the time you're begging, pleading, and resorting to bribery, you have already lost the battle and your kids are going to walk all over you for the rest of their lives.
And then of course there's the fact that a lot of the people I see with kids were left to be feral little balls of evil by their own parents and haven't got the slightest idea of what to do.
You need a license to own a dog, but any moron can have a kid.
Yeah, and everyone is going to cause the same class of problems, have the same kinds of failure modes and corner cases, and they're all going to throw their hands up in the air and say "oh, I have no idea what to do, you drive meat puppet".
In the early 80s everyone was working against a fairly well described architecture for the PC, and ultimately used the same parts or licensed fabrication of their own piece.
For a driver-less car system, having a bunch of companies develop these and hope they work feels like it will end up being the wild west of hoping you don't encounter a random failure mode at any given time.
There really needs to be some level of standards and certification applied here -- or the driver-less cars are going to make the same kind of stupid mistakes as things like the IoT are making now. Companies will be lazy, take shortcuts, miss some things entirely ... and it will be the consumers who have to buy them and field test them.
The idea of a bunch of companies trying to solve this problem, and a bunch of cheap knock-offs and other bits of corner cutting being responsible for driving us around is kind of scary.
If your kid is making income online from porn, then you have other issues you should be worried about.
Other than that, these warning signs probably describe the teenage years of a large chunk of people on Slashdot.
They basically say "if your teenager uses a computer, is moody, and keeps odd hours you should totally report him as a criminal just in case". The entire thing sounds like it was written by some clueless idiot who doesn't know anything about the life of a teenage nerd.
It's really long on hysteria, and really short on substance.
LOL, OK, on behalf of those of us without a clinical diagnosis, but craptacular human interaction skills ... for the love of god, please tell us where these rules are written down.
Nobody told me there was a frickin' manual for this stuff.
At this point can we trust VW when they say "it's OK, we're fine, nothing bad happened"?
I'm inclined to think no.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But this isn't something which you can just take them at their word without verifying ... they've already lost credibility, which means they don't get it back just by telling us it's all OK.
Essentially this boils down to the police lack the skills and sophistication of the people they're trying to stop, and in the process they're getting their asses handed to them and losing the money they have as bait.
You have to admire the audacity, but you can't go around thinking law enforcement has the right skillset to fight these people on their own turf.
In an ever on-going arms race, the bad guys are more numerous, likely have more resources and time, and are quite motivated.
I mean, it's not like in the real world you'd grab an officer, give him some slouchy shorts, a wallet chain and a beanie cap and send him in to pretend like he fits in with who you're looking for.
So, yeah, organized crooks using the intertubes know more about the intertubes than the police trying to stop them. Film at 11.
I absolutely LOVE the Pig Alert ... it's just so damned hilarious in a vaguely kind of cyberpunk sort of way.
Welcome to the world of CEOs, where competence and results have nothing at all to do with how much damned money you get paid.
I don't think she's a plant, I think Yahoo was a company which was far too screwed to readily turn itself around, and they've utterly failed to do it.
Inability of a CEO to turn around a company which has been floundering and lurching around for years doesn't necessitate a conspiracy. I think it points to the fact that people act like CEOs have any actual idea of what they're doing.
I mean, I can incompetently manage Yahoo for half the money.
Wow ... you live in a state with legalized marijuana, don't you?
Yes, no actual timelords ... we got it, thanks. ;-)
Yup, fascists and fanatics want to censor things.
Either because people don't agree with your politics, or your religion, or your choice of text editor, or flavor of ice cream.
I consider people who want to resort to censorship to be essentially morally bankrupt assholes.
But then, this is Eric Schmidt. So I already considered him one.
I cringe at how readily Western society is prepared to become unhinged and start throwing away our freedoms in order to claim to be protecting our freedoms.
Beware the guy who wants to cut through such things in order to achieve their agenda. Because in the end they'll stop at nothing and utterly fail to see the problems they're creating.
I don't want to live in a world where some asshole billionaire is the arbiter of what can and can't be said.