As long as there are no data privacy laws, and until there are very harsh penalties for failing to keep your data safe, your data pretty much isn't safe and never will be.
Between people doing a bad job of anonymizing, or companies wanting to monetize your information, there is no incentive to keep your data secure, and no penalty for failing to do so.
You are completely correct, this stuff will get tied to you, it will get used for things you never consented to, and it will come back to bite you in the ass.
We can't trust corporations with our email addresses or our credit card information. Trusting them with our genetic information is bordering on idiotic.
Much like all those secret spy powers which were only supposed to be used to fight terrorists are now being used to do every other aspect of law enforcement... this stuff will be used for everything you can imagine.
Once that genie is out of the bottle, you can kiss goodbye the idea of this staying private or not getting abused.
Other features are in the works, such as sync and built-in mail client that will be introduced when they hit a more stable state
Can we have a browser which is, you know, just a browser?
We don't want social integrations, we don't want cross device linking, we don't need an emailclient, a chat client, something to manage our contacts, sidebars, or any of a dozen features we just turn off an ignore.
We want a browser, small, lean, standards compliant, not a memory pig, and which respects our privacy.
Stop trying to make some do-everything turd which wants to be the center of our freaking lives. We don't need another one of those.
And that was pretty much Microsoft changing their core APIs to ensure OS/2 broke as much as possible. I think the old saying was "Windows aint done until Lotus won't run", even if it was just a myth.
Which is really a shame, because while Windows was a still a crappy OS without real hardware-level preemptive multi-tasking, crap resource management, and an inability to actually use all of its memory, OS/2 was a pretty solid operating system which didn't let a single crashing application crash the whole damned computer like Windows did. OS/2 was light years ahead of Windows at the time.
But then a bunch of us found Linux and got all that for free.
However, I'm not really surprised it's still entrenched in enough places people still want it; technology which works never really goes away. How often do we still see IBM terminal emulators hooked up to a mainframe?
Obviously people are still using it, even if it is old and busted. Because like any legacy platform, it's often amazingly difficult to get away from it without spending huge amounts of money to get a system which doesn't work a fraction as well.
Wow, years ago, as a fresh-scrubbed nerd hanging out with other nerds, gravitational lensing was as yet unproven; it was based in science, but I don't think anybody had done it yet.
Of course, this was right around the time when we were on the cusp of seriously discussing exoplanets, yet to confirm a black hole, still working on hubble, and when radio astronomy was still coming into its own. Things which are almost commonplace were cutting edge stuff which hadn't happened yet.
To all the physicists, astrophysicists, amateurs, and other people who have made space discovery so damned awesome for the last few decades... you're fucking awesome, and thanks for showing us just how cool the universe is.
Last time I checked, the FCC was run by Democrats.
Funny, last time I checked it was ran by lobbyists for the cable and wireless industry. Which tends to be the case no matter which fucking party is in power.
Pretty much these days government has been completely co-opted by corporate interests, and governments are merely tools to protect profits.
Look, in emails, and all the way through Usenet and frigging dial up BBS systems... the start of a thread IS the subject line.
I don't get this bitching about actually using the damned subject line for exactly what they've been used for 30+ years.
Do you expect some random salutation or other piece of text completely unrelated to the body?
We don't need a damned car analogy, we need to stop having a bunch of whiny idiots trying to redefine WTF the subject line is there for, and how it's been used for decades.
"But what makes me upset is that the crap is for completely bogus reasons." The new improved code uses fancy stuff that wants magical built-in compiler support and has silly wrapper functions for when it doesn't exist.
You know, ranting about pointless language additions which add to complexity for no real purpose is something Linus should be ranting about.
Shiny code for the sake of shiny code produces bloat, and frequently quit bad code.
His post goes on to describe the code that angered him as "A shiny function that we have never ever needed anywhere else, and that is just compiler-masturbation." complete idiotic crap "anm [sic] idiotic unreadable mess." "a f*cking bad excuse for that braindamage."
I'm sure most coders have known someone who always put in 'clever' code which was far less good than the author thought it was.
This looks distinctly like code which is too clever for its own good.
"Where is it going . . . ?" I don't think HP's senior management can answer that question.
Sadly, I have mostly concluded that an alarming amount of large corporations have senior management who mostly don't have a clue.
Especially in companies who have grown through acquisition, there seems to be a lot of gaps between what the CEO thinks exists, and what actually exists. They just end up mismanaging a bunch of units which at one point were pretty good, but have been pretty much wrecked by lousy management.
I've maintained for years mergers and acquisitions really only make short term profits, but in the long-term destroys good technologies and organizations by screwing up what was good about them in the first place.
That, and the fact that the sales people take the commission money and run like hell, and nobody ever checks if the the lies they sold don't cause a mess in the long run... how many of us have seen stuff which the sales weasels pitched, and which cost 3-4x to deliver and support? Often companies don't seem to know just how bad the disconnect is between sales and reality. The same goes for 'executive compensation', it's not tied to any long-term results, just the stock price this quarter.
The bigger the corporation, often the less clue management actually has.
I'm betting years of bad decisions has left HP (and other companies) with so many pieces and parts they haven't got the slightest idea of how to run it all.
Then all you end up with is a bunch of demoralized people who have been so badly mismanaged there's simply no way to fix it. And that isn't the fault of those divisions, it's the fault of terrible management in the first place.
"Every ten seconds, the most popular keystroke in Twitch chat will be entered into an Arch Linux virtual machine."
Holy fuck, so we're literally just going for the million poo-flinging monkeys and you'll arrive there by random chance??
This isn't crowd sourcing or harnessing the wisdom of crowds.
No, I didn't RTFA... but this sounds like an utter waste if time. But, hey, if you want to waste your time on crap like this, go ahead.. just don't pretend it's newsworthy.
So where to go for active innovation like 3D/VR desktop, artificial intelligence, drag and drop ability to mash up UI of multiple apps
Holy crap, I just got bingo!!
rough around the edges but usable and exciting enough to use as daily desktop
Exciting?? What the hell? You want 'exciting' plug a Windows box direct to the intertubes with no firewall.
I heard some crazy guy has a "praise jeebus" operating system or something, but I'm pretty sure I have never once heard anybody say "gee, what I want is a desktop which is exciting to use".
New features which serve a purpose are good, but this screams of asking for pointless and shiny because you seem think it should be there.
Give me Tony Stark's Iron Man interface, and I'll be excited. Everything else is just pointless eye candy of people making something whiz bang which doesn't actually do anything.
Otherwise we're just resurrecting the SGI "Hey, this is UNIX" interface from Jurassic Park. (And, yes, it was a real interface.)
Do you understand the function of a hypervisor? Do you understand how tremendously BAD it is if the host OS can control the hypervisor?
For seven years, Xen virtualization software used by Amazon Web Services and other cloud computing providers has contained a vulnerability that allowed attackers to break out of their confined accounts and access extremely sensitive parts of the underlying operating system.
So, imagine... all these people selling cloud services, making millions and millions of dollars... now, imagine that those things in the cloud can control the infrastructure for the cloud, when they should have no way in hell of doing that.
"The above is a political way of stating the bug is a very critical one," researchers with Qubes OS, a desktop operating system that uses Xen to secure sensitive resources, wrote in an analysis published Thursday. "Probably the worst we have seen affecting the Xen hypervisor, ever. Sadly."
For a hypervisor, this is pretty much an epic fail.
Well, yes, they want fully indoctrinated, indentured servants, educated to their specifications.
This has nothing to do with giving a damn about children, as it does creating their workforce of the future, which has been raised on the kool-aid and is beholden to them.
LOL... searching, sure.. it's, uh, natively supported, but a little slow, and there aren't any APIs.;-)
If I know approximately when something happened, I can usually find it fairly quickly.
I've known a lot of people who spend a lot of time trying to keep their digital version working, or upgrading it, or whatever. It can degrade into technology fetishism, and it becomes all about having a tool to do it. People can spent a lot of time getting their digital tools "just so", almost to the point they don't do the things they're keeping the notes for.
I knew someone who spent countless hours organizing his stuff on his Palm Pilot back in the day. And didn't really spend a lot of time doing the actual tasks. He did, however, have the most awesomely organized collection of digital notes imaginable. Pity he never actually delivered on his tasks. It's like he wasted all sorts of time organizing his notes and not doing the tasks. Which defeated the purpose of the notes.
I readily admit you can make backups and do all sorts of fancy things with digital versions, and that not everybody is going to fall into the trap of focusing on the tools.
Me, I've been keeping paper notes for a very long time, it's my preferred long-term solution. And if I lose those notes in a fire, I know damned well there will be things I say "I have no idea".
As long as you're not just doing digital note-keeping because it seems like a fun toy, run wild. But when you reach the point of spending more time fiddling with your notes than actually making use of them... you've crossed the line to just wasting your damned time.
I used to take copious notes and kept them forever but that just pissed people off; there's comfort in having their thoughts from the past forgotten
Ummmm.... tough?
My notes are my record of what happens. They're my CYA in case someone demands we do something stupid, or comes back later and tries to claim something else was agreed upon. And they're how I know what was decided and what I need to be doing.
Too bad if your good notes are a problem for someone later on who doesn't want the things they've said remembered. I'm not saying that "John said that Sally has a bad haircut" is something you write down. You're not trying to be the National Enquirer here.
But if John says he'll deliver the document to Sally, and that he agrees with your proposal... you sure as hell record that.
Because when John tries to blame it on you later on, you flip back to your notes and say "nope, says right here". Because we're all met that particular John guy who tries to rewrite history and claim he never agreed to that.
In fact, with sales guys, and VPs and the like, I make an extra point of making sure they see I'm writing it down. Because they're the most likely to suddenly develop a case of remembering things differently than actually happened.
I'm not there to provide comfort for people who would rather people not remember what they said.
Bah, my paper notebooks have native support for drawings, bullet lists, any font I choose, arbitrary orientation of text, footnotes, annotations, and all sorts of things.;-)
If I could just plug it into a KVM, or with a small cable connect to my tablet, it would work fine. Finding a display device isn't an insurmountable problem.
Of course, if you can get us the spray on screen, that would be awesome too.
Honestly, then blame the people who make the routers, or what these other pieces. But suing some little old granny for having an insecure OS/router/thermostat makes no sense.
Start making vendors of this stuff bear some responsibility when it's sold insecure, left wide open, and then exploited. Holding consumers for badly written products is plain silly.
You can't expect every grandma with a computer to be a security expert.
Nobody said "blame Microsoft for every security hole in the world". But if you sell a product and that becomes the reasons why these computers are getting exploited, blame the company who made it.
Is this a case of the US getting all whiny when someone else does the exact same shit they do?
The issue goes beyond old Cold War worries that the Russians would tap into the cables -- a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago
If so, you'll forgive the rest of the world for not giving a fuck.
Boo hoo, teh Russians are going to spy on us the same way we spy on everyone else. Waahh, how unfair.
Honestly, this clueless double standard is mind boggling. What the hell did you expect? Other countries to not do this stuff?
The only thing I want to be internet connected is my computers, my tablet, and only very rarely my phone.
The rest of this internet connected crap I have no interest in, because I assume the security is incompetently written, and the product is mostly geared to allow analytics and ads... none of which I have any interest in.
An endless series of crap products which are connecting to the intertubes is just marketing hype.
If we have a comet streaming these compounds out into space, there's pretty much not a whole lot of scenarios in which the basis building blocks of life aren't pretty common.
If most of the water on Earth came from cometary bombardment, and comets are documented as having these materials... then you really only can make the conclusion that some other pile of rock has gone through the same process.
As much as people like to think we're special and magical, the reality is the initial steps of life are just chemistry. And in all likelihood have happened in other places.
The universe is, in the original sense of the word, awesome. It's pretty much full of things we've only begun to realize, and it's utterly vast.
I find it hard to believe there isn't at least some form of life elsewhere in the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as there are no data privacy laws, and until there are very harsh penalties for failing to keep your data safe, your data pretty much isn't safe and never will be.
Between people doing a bad job of anonymizing, or companies wanting to monetize your information, there is no incentive to keep your data secure, and no penalty for failing to do so.
You are completely correct, this stuff will get tied to you, it will get used for things you never consented to, and it will come back to bite you in the ass.
We can't trust corporations with our email addresses or our credit card information. Trusting them with our genetic information is bordering on idiotic.
Much like all those secret spy powers which were only supposed to be used to fight terrorists are now being used to do every other aspect of law enforcement ... this stuff will be used for everything you can imagine.
Once that genie is out of the bottle, you can kiss goodbye the idea of this staying private or not getting abused.
Can we have a browser which is, you know, just a browser?
We don't want social integrations, we don't want cross device linking, we don't need an emailclient, a chat client, something to manage our contacts, sidebars, or any of a dozen features we just turn off an ignore.
We want a browser, small, lean, standards compliant, not a memory pig, and which respects our privacy.
Stop trying to make some do-everything turd which wants to be the center of our freaking lives. We don't need another one of those.
Do one thing, a web browser, that's it.
kthanksbye
Well, yeah, it really didn't catch on.
And that was pretty much Microsoft changing their core APIs to ensure OS/2 broke as much as possible. I think the old saying was "Windows aint done until Lotus won't run", even if it was just a myth.
Which is really a shame, because while Windows was a still a crappy OS without real hardware-level preemptive multi-tasking, crap resource management, and an inability to actually use all of its memory, OS/2 was a pretty solid operating system which didn't let a single crashing application crash the whole damned computer like Windows did. OS/2 was light years ahead of Windows at the time.
But then a bunch of us found Linux and got all that for free.
However, I'm not really surprised it's still entrenched in enough places people still want it; technology which works never really goes away. How often do we still see IBM terminal emulators hooked up to a mainframe?
Obviously people are still using it, even if it is old and busted. Because like any legacy platform, it's often amazingly difficult to get away from it without spending huge amounts of money to get a system which doesn't work a fraction as well.
Wow, years ago, as a fresh-scrubbed nerd hanging out with other nerds, gravitational lensing was as yet unproven; it was based in science, but I don't think anybody had done it yet.
Of course, this was right around the time when we were on the cusp of seriously discussing exoplanets, yet to confirm a black hole, still working on hubble, and when radio astronomy was still coming into its own. Things which are almost commonplace were cutting edge stuff which hadn't happened yet.
To all the physicists, astrophysicists, amateurs, and other people who have made space discovery so damned awesome for the last few decades ... you're fucking awesome, and thanks for showing us just how cool the universe is.
Funny, last time I checked it was ran by lobbyists for the cable and wireless industry. Which tends to be the case no matter which fucking party is in power.
Pretty much these days government has been completely co-opted by corporate interests, and governments are merely tools to protect profits.
What the hell do you expect, "Dear Sir"?
Look, in emails, and all the way through Usenet and frigging dial up BBS systems ... the start of a thread IS the subject line.
I don't get this bitching about actually using the damned subject line for exactly what they've been used for 30+ years.
Do you expect some random salutation or other piece of text completely unrelated to the body?
We don't need a damned car analogy, we need to stop having a bunch of whiny idiots trying to redefine WTF the subject line is there for, and how it's been used for decades.
You know, ranting about pointless language additions which add to complexity for no real purpose is something Linus should be ranting about.
Shiny code for the sake of shiny code produces bloat, and frequently quit bad code.
I'm sure most coders have known someone who always put in 'clever' code which was far less good than the author thought it was.
This looks distinctly like code which is too clever for its own good.
Sadly, I have mostly concluded that an alarming amount of large corporations have senior management who mostly don't have a clue.
Especially in companies who have grown through acquisition, there seems to be a lot of gaps between what the CEO thinks exists, and what actually exists. They just end up mismanaging a bunch of units which at one point were pretty good, but have been pretty much wrecked by lousy management.
I've maintained for years mergers and acquisitions really only make short term profits, but in the long-term destroys good technologies and organizations by screwing up what was good about them in the first place.
That, and the fact that the sales people take the commission money and run like hell, and nobody ever checks if the the lies they sold don't cause a mess in the long run ... how many of us have seen stuff which the sales weasels pitched, and which cost 3-4x to deliver and support? Often companies don't seem to know just how bad the disconnect is between sales and reality. The same goes for 'executive compensation', it's not tied to any long-term results, just the stock price this quarter.
The bigger the corporation, often the less clue management actually has.
I'm betting years of bad decisions has left HP (and other companies) with so many pieces and parts they haven't got the slightest idea of how to run it all.
Then all you end up with is a bunch of demoralized people who have been so badly mismanaged there's simply no way to fix it. And that isn't the fault of those divisions, it's the fault of terrible management in the first place.
Holy fuck, so we're literally just going for the million poo-flinging monkeys and you'll arrive there by random chance??
This isn't crowd sourcing or harnessing the wisdom of crowds.
No, I didn't RTFA ... but this sounds like an utter waste if time. But, hey, if you want to waste your time on crap like this, go ahead .. just don't pretend it's newsworthy.
Holy crap, I just got bingo!!
Exciting?? What the hell? You want 'exciting' plug a Windows box direct to the intertubes with no firewall.
I heard some crazy guy has a "praise jeebus" operating system or something, but I'm pretty sure I have never once heard anybody say "gee, what I want is a desktop which is exciting to use".
New features which serve a purpose are good, but this screams of asking for pointless and shiny because you seem think it should be there.
Give me Tony Stark's Iron Man interface, and I'll be excited. Everything else is just pointless eye candy of people making something whiz bang which doesn't actually do anything.
Otherwise we're just resurrecting the SGI "Hey, this is UNIX" interface from Jurassic Park. (And, yes, it was a real interface.)
Now get off my damned lawn.
Do you understand the function of a hypervisor? Do you understand how tremendously BAD it is if the host OS can control the hypervisor?
So, imagine ... all these people selling cloud services, making millions and millions of dollars ... now, imagine that those things in the cloud can control the infrastructure for the cloud, when they should have no way in hell of doing that.
For a hypervisor, this is pretty much an epic fail.
Well, yes, they want fully indoctrinated, indentured servants, educated to their specifications.
This has nothing to do with giving a damn about children, as it does creating their workforce of the future, which has been raised on the kool-aid and is beholden to them.
I trust Zuckerfuck not at all in this situation.
No, really, hear me out ... about a kilometer or so off shore, continuously chum the water with lawyers.
This way the sharks are always well fed, and won't come in-shore.
Of course, the animal rights groups might object that feeding the lawyers to the sharks might harm the sharks, but they'll come around.
This is why grownups who have meetings have someone send meeting minutes.
Specifically because there are far too many assholes in the world to not take steps to a) cover your ass, and b) hold people accountable.
I've lost track of the times that 2-3 people all pull up the meeting notes and day "nope, you were the one who decided we wouldn't do that".
Keeping VPs from weaseling out of stuff/assigning blame later is a valuable life skill.
LOL ... searching, sure .. it's, uh, natively supported, but a little slow, and there aren't any APIs. ;-)
If I know approximately when something happened, I can usually find it fairly quickly.
I've known a lot of people who spend a lot of time trying to keep their digital version working, or upgrading it, or whatever. It can degrade into technology fetishism, and it becomes all about having a tool to do it. People can spent a lot of time getting their digital tools "just so", almost to the point they don't do the things they're keeping the notes for.
I knew someone who spent countless hours organizing his stuff on his Palm Pilot back in the day. And didn't really spend a lot of time doing the actual tasks. He did, however, have the most awesomely organized collection of digital notes imaginable. Pity he never actually delivered on his tasks. It's like he wasted all sorts of time organizing his notes and not doing the tasks. Which defeated the purpose of the notes.
I readily admit you can make backups and do all sorts of fancy things with digital versions, and that not everybody is going to fall into the trap of focusing on the tools.
Me, I've been keeping paper notes for a very long time, it's my preferred long-term solution. And if I lose those notes in a fire, I know damned well there will be things I say "I have no idea".
As long as you're not just doing digital note-keeping because it seems like a fun toy, run wild. But when you reach the point of spending more time fiddling with your notes than actually making use of them ... you've crossed the line to just wasting your damned time.
Ummmm .... tough?
My notes are my record of what happens. They're my CYA in case someone demands we do something stupid, or comes back later and tries to claim something else was agreed upon. And they're how I know what was decided and what I need to be doing.
Too bad if your good notes are a problem for someone later on who doesn't want the things they've said remembered. I'm not saying that "John said that Sally has a bad haircut" is something you write down. You're not trying to be the National Enquirer here.
But if John says he'll deliver the document to Sally, and that he agrees with your proposal ... you sure as hell record that.
Because when John tries to blame it on you later on, you flip back to your notes and say "nope, says right here". Because we're all met that particular John guy who tries to rewrite history and claim he never agreed to that.
In fact, with sales guys, and VPs and the like, I make an extra point of making sure they see I'm writing it down. Because they're the most likely to suddenly develop a case of remembering things differently than actually happened.
I'm not there to provide comfort for people who would rather people not remember what they said.
Bah, my paper notebooks have native support for drawings, bullet lists, any font I choose, arbitrary orientation of text, footnotes, annotations, and all sorts of things. ;-)
I kick it old school ... I have a stack of lab books spanning the last 20+ years.
I write the date on the page, and start taking notes.
No technology required.
I don't think it won't. In fact, I assume it will.
I'm explicitly saying lack of a display isn't an insurmountable problem.
That you think that I think this won't hook up to a KVM ... well, that's entirely your own damned problem. Because I never said that.
If I could just plug it into a KVM, or with a small cable connect to my tablet, it would work fine. Finding a display device isn't an insurmountable problem.
Of course, if you can get us the spray on screen, that would be awesome too.
Honestly, then blame the people who make the routers, or what these other pieces. But suing some little old granny for having an insecure OS/router/thermostat makes no sense.
Start making vendors of this stuff bear some responsibility when it's sold insecure, left wide open, and then exploited. Holding consumers for badly written products is plain silly.
You can't expect every grandma with a computer to be a security expert.
Nobody said "blame Microsoft for every security hole in the world". But if you sell a product and that becomes the reasons why these computers are getting exploited, blame the company who made it.
Is this a case of the US getting all whiny when someone else does the exact same shit they do?
If so, you'll forgive the rest of the world for not giving a fuck.
Boo hoo, teh Russians are going to spy on us the same way we spy on everyone else. Waahh, how unfair.
Honestly, this clueless double standard is mind boggling. What the hell did you expect? Other countries to not do this stuff?
Yup, just say no to this crap.
The only thing I want to be internet connected is my computers, my tablet, and only very rarely my phone.
The rest of this internet connected crap I have no interest in, because I assume the security is incompetently written, and the product is mostly geared to allow analytics and ads ... none of which I have any interest in.
An endless series of crap products which are connecting to the intertubes is just marketing hype.
If we have a comet streaming these compounds out into space, there's pretty much not a whole lot of scenarios in which the basis building blocks of life aren't pretty common.
If most of the water on Earth came from cometary bombardment, and comets are documented as having these materials ... then you really only can make the conclusion that some other pile of rock has gone through the same process.
As much as people like to think we're special and magical, the reality is the initial steps of life are just chemistry. And in all likelihood have happened in other places.
The universe is, in the original sense of the word, awesome. It's pretty much full of things we've only begun to realize, and it's utterly vast.
I find it hard to believe there isn't at least some form of life elsewhere in the universe.
And, really, anybody who doesn't do this at their place of work is probably both violating corporate security policies, and is likely an idiot.
If you're in an office full of people and not locking your computer and your personal items, you are simply asking for trouble.
Not saying trust nobody but ... well, actually, yes. I am saying that a healthy level of distrust is a good idea in general.
Sooner or later someone will reinforce that notion for you.