Oh, I don't know... it's a real vulnerability, dated Monday, and rated as a 9 (I assume out of 10)... in terms of being an actual thing and showing up in a timely manner, I'm not sure I'd call it clickbait.
Now, anything Nerval's Lobster posts which links to Dice? That I'd call clickbait.
I must admit some of these security exploits elude me a little, but I've read both of TFAs, and I guess my question is "what the heck is this SFX window and what's it for"?
Why the heck is an archiving program executing arbitrary code in the first place? That's crazy.
Questions about place settings at a dinner table (eg, cup & saucer) might be easier for someone from a higher socio-economic group than for someone who is food-insecure.
Well, I didn't grow up wealthy by any means, and I wouldn't say I was "food insecure"... at least not in terms of how I'd really think of that term... but if at any point in my life someone had used place settings at a dinner table as a measure of IQ, I'd be forced to conclude the test was bullshit.
The ability to know which fork goes with which course, or on what side of the plate, presumes a culture in which you give a damn about such things and equate it with intelligence.
Which, I would argue, it completely moronic.
As would be knowing the precise angle my pinky would be expected to project drinking from said cup and saucer.
These things "how well can he eat in the big house with the rich folks"... and I'm afraid pretty much everybody I grew up with would fail that utterly.
Please tell me the cup and saucer thing or place settings is just a made up example and not a real part of the tests?
What if discrimination is genetic? That is, there are more gifted kids born to high-status high-income parents.
Hmmm... kind of by definition that's not "genetic", but socioeconomic.
Basically it becomes the circular argument of we define "gifted" as the children of parents who can afford to give these children early advantages and exhibit the traits being measured... and then you can't claim those children who have had additional advantages are "gifted", but "lucky enough to come from privileged backgrounds".
The selection of traits is one thing, the ability to afford to cause the conditions for those traits isn't natural selection.
There is a breathtaking amount of critical infrastructure
But, really, there's your answer.
There's tons of important stuff. Every day, there's more stuff. A lot of that stuff is protected by security which was designed and implemented by drunken chimpanzees -- or, as often as not, essentially not secured at all.
There's all that tasty data out there, and data and information is valuable.
So, from the US and Israel making that Stuxnet thing, or the "Interweb of Stuff" producing products with garbage security... as long as people have digital things, and there is a benefit to getting those things, and security is in the hands of people who may or may not know what they're doing... you'll find attacking that information carries value.
So, government mandated backdoors or weaknesses in crypto, or incompetently implemented security in commercial products... these things all make this something which is worth chasing for the entities involved.
If it wasn't worth it, people wouldn't be doing it. Just like all forms of espionage or crime.
I'm pretty sure that, taken across the planet and in smaller scales, you'll find humans are pretty much constantly killing one another.
Those of us living in nice communities in Western countries don't see it as much.
But, really, throughout much of the world, humans killing humans has been a staple of life pretty much forever. There's a lot of places where life is pretty cheap.
At a nation to nation scale it may seem well ordered and small, but on smaller scales I'd venture to say it's pretty pervasive.
I'm betting the number of people who will die today from human to human violence is probably a staggering number.
Bah... how long were the guys on Wall Street who robbed the world by lying about the junk debt they'd repacked sentenced to? How about the ratings agencies who signed off and said the junk debt was AAA rated? What did they get?
Yes, it's widespread fraud... but $500 million worldwide is a drop in the bucket compared to what "legitimate" corporations have been doing.
If we hadn't see people do far worse and get away with almost no penalty I'd be doing something other than guffawing and saying "yeah, right".
You can do fraud on much larger scales if you're a corporation and have made the right campaign donations. And you'll be hailed as a fucking hero.
That could definitely affect the "1,356 developers 30 years" estimate in the article.
Sure, but look at it this way: way more developers than that have been working away on Linux for the last 20+ years.
My experience with people trying to re-write a similar set of functionality from scratch, and covering all of the corner cases, exceptions, audits, and bug fixes... that tells me that it takes a LOT longer to write something like that.
So, ignoring the userland stuff, and things which hook into Linux, it's still a massive undertaking to write it, test it, verify it, find all the issues, identify and fix exploits... all of those things take a lot of time.
I don't think it's all that unrealistic to think that trying to rebuild it from scratch would be a massive undertaking, costing huge sums of money... because it already was a massive undertaking. A lot of it might have been done without someone directly paying for it, but it took a hell of a lot of resources.
But the 20+ years of who knows how many people which have gone into Linux isn't something you could reproduce quickly. I don't buy that for a minute. You'd have security holes, crash conditions, optimizations, errors, or huge gaps in functionality.
So, in a roundabout way... thanks to all the people who have made Linux what it is. Because it's far too easy to undervalue it or take it for granted.
Wait, what? Does the Linux Foundation own either of those two things?
Linux isn't "every piece of Gnu software on the planet", and I seriously doubt very much the Linux Foundation either claims to own GNU Hurd, or has anything to do with it being pushed.
Are you perhaps totally confused about what "Linux" is? I'll give you a hint... it's the core operating system. It's certainly not every piece of GNU software, and it's definitely got nothing to do with GNU Hurd.
If every corporation which relies on Linux as part of its infrastructure had to buy or build every piece of technology required to replace Linux, I should think on a global scale it would be far more than that.
Because a lot of that effort would be duplicated by multiple companies.. and of course the patent litigation by all of the players who seek to claim they invented some piece of technology which predates them.
I can believe $5 billion in this quite easily.
Of course, I can't read the paper since I need to fill out some fscking form from, and that's not happening.
Pity the Linux Foundation doesn't believe in open information.
Why not try to analyze whether his statements have some merit, rather than just fuel the culture of outrage?
Because I don't give a fuck about some guy who wrote a piece of software, and his personal manifesto. I don't need to validate his position, or evaluate it for merit -- that's not my problem.
See, I'm not committing a logical fallacy, since I'm not refuting his points... I am dismissing him out of hand as an irrelevant, whiny little twat who wants to take his ball and go home. He's more than welcome to do that. He can do it for any stupid reason he chooses.
And the rest of the world is free to dismiss him as a crackpot and not give a damn about his crazy rantings.
The reality is, he isn't withholding anything nobody can't live without, and while he's free to do as he chooses with his software... everyone else is free to not give a fuck.
We certainly don't need to acknowledge, validate, or give credibility to his temper tantrum. That's his damned problem.
If someone said tomorrow I can't use a piece of software because I'm not a Christian, I'm also going to conclude that person is a moron and an asshole, and be equally dismissive of them. But I'm not going to coddle or validate his feelings because he needs to act like a moron and an asshole.
So basically he's a batshit crazy idiot who is ranting publicly and acting like a whiny bitch?
Congratulations, Gangolf Judd... you're an idiot, and a moron.
Although the change in the license may be a nuisance for some researchers, the program is far from irreplaceable, several scientists tell ScienceInsider. Treefinder had not been updated for several years and it was mostly used by researchers who had grown used to it, they say.
And largely irrelevant, from reading this.
Strimmer says. It is not clear whether Jobb still has a job. (His website says that he âoecannot work as a scientist, because my traditional views and values conflict with that eliteâ(TM)s doctrine.â)
Everything about this article suggests some raving idiot sitting in the dark lamenting how the world won't adhere to his bullshit beliefs.
Until you factor in the time it takes, the nuisance it introduces, and the chance that over time your USB port suffers additional wear and tear.
I mean, you've added nothing of value here... you might as well have said "why, gee, why not just have a whole second desk and walk over to it?"
Clearly the poster has some specific use cases in mind. And I wouldn't waste my time moving USB ports for the two computers I have on KVM, let around mucking around with it for several computers and monitors -- the more pieces there are the more it becomes a pain in the ass and a waste of time..
As a grumpy old man who sometimes sees a lot of technology as pointless, even I look at your response and think "yeah, let's not do it that way".
But oh noes, you'll have to change the monitor inputs individually.
Hmmm... but how often do you do it every day?
I've got two monitors, two computers (laptop and desktop), and a cheap Belkin Flip KVM -- not nearly as complicated as the poster. My laptop is work, my desktop is my own stuff.
My laptop is on the left, and when I use the KVM the middle screen mirrors the main screen of the laptop (bigger, and right in front of me), or is the left screen of the desktop -- the right screen is always my desktop's right screen.
I switch between by desktop and my laptop about 40-50x/day... all with one button.
Even for my simple setup, having to change my monitor inputs manually would add a crap load of extra time.
How many button presses does it take for you to change inputs on the monitor? If it's more than 1 is starts to become cumbersome. If it's more than 2 it's probably tedious. If it's more than 3 it's probably annoying as hell.
Because they can... and because people will pay for it.
Paying that kind of money for an OEM Bluetooth keyboard? That's someone who hasn't been paying attention and is easily separated from their money.
Everybody acts like the keyboard with a Surface tablet is some great invention.
The reality is, a cheap Bluetooth keyboard will pair with pretty much anything... Android, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung. And they've been around for years.
Honestly, I bought a Bluetooth keyboard case for my Nexus 7 for something like $25... if you feel you need a keyboard, buy one and stop bitching about it.
It's a well solved problem. For the 99% of the time I don't need a keyboard, it's not really much of a big deal... and a few times a year I put up the kickstand, turn on the keyboard, and type.
I think I'll wait to see how badly this does on my older Nexus 7.
My experience is Google might want to push it to me, but that the device stands a pretty good chance of being rendered useless with an update which is either badly tested or too damned slow.
Besides, day 1 updates are for suckers who don't realize they get to be the beta testers and find all the problems.
So when will we start holding ad agencies accountable for what is basically hacking?
This is precisely why I will never have any qualms about blocking every damned ad site I can possibly identify... because they're all ran by assholes who feel entitled to do anything they wish.
They're untrustworthy, and willing to do anything for a buck. Which means we should be blocking the hell out of this shit.
Boo hoo to anybody who says they need the ad revenue... unless you plan on being accountable for this shit done by your advertisers, stop expecting us to trust them or you.
I can't tell you how many stupid platforms I've been subjected to at work which seem to labor under the bullshit premise that my work, or anybody else's, is going to be improved by "teh soshul medias".
All those things with badges for participation and the like? I hate these things in real life, and I despise them in my work life. It propagates the stupid belief that by adding more volume of pointless content and getting recognized as a "good contributor" that it generates anything of value.
Introversion means you simply don't want 500 Facebook friends, don't see the structure of "social media" as enhancing anything, and actively want no part of it.
Somewhere along the line when companies started using this cap internally as if it was going to save the corporate culture and make us all more productive, they lost the plot. So now you have a bunch of magpies who use it because it's cool and fun, and a bunch of people who can't find anything useful because it's crammed full of inane garbage and notifications that someone liked someone else's post.
I'm not looking for "cool and fun", I'm looking for information to do my job. And I don't want it structured in such a way as to require me to sift through a bunch of "workversations" to find the useful bits among the rubbish. The signal to noise ratio renders the platform largely useless.
If this crap in the workplace feels useless and distracting, I can only imagine that in an educational setting it leaves a lot of kids thinking "why would I do this, how does it help me, and why am I being forced to use this crap?"
Social media is rewarding if you want to be constantly validated as participating in a group and have a video-game level of "accomplishments", and it's utterly useless if you don't. It just ads a layer of pointless crap which has nothing to do with what you're trying to do... but it satisfies some clueless halfwit who saw a seminar which said that social media would make everything better.
Give me the tools to do my damned job, and don't impose some framework where I have to pretend to want to have a social conversation to extract every single piece of information. Because it makes for terribly organized information which is less useful the more stuff is around it.
Other than making some people feel better about things, I'm not convinced social media helps you accomplish a damned thing.
I sincerely hope the trend that everything is social media ends soon -- because it's annoying as hell, and in my experience, not substantiated in terms of what it actually accomplishes.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I don't know ... it's a real vulnerability, dated Monday, and rated as a 9 (I assume out of 10) ... in terms of being an actual thing and showing up in a timely manner, I'm not sure I'd call it clickbait.
Now, anything Nerval's Lobster posts which links to Dice? That I'd call clickbait.
I must admit some of these security exploits elude me a little, but I've read both of TFAs, and I guess my question is "what the heck is this SFX window and what's it for"?
Why the heck is an archiving program executing arbitrary code in the first place? That's crazy.
Well, I didn't grow up wealthy by any means, and I wouldn't say I was "food insecure" ... at least not in terms of how I'd really think of that term ... but if at any point in my life someone had used place settings at a dinner table as a measure of IQ, I'd be forced to conclude the test was bullshit.
The ability to know which fork goes with which course, or on what side of the plate, presumes a culture in which you give a damn about such things and equate it with intelligence.
Which, I would argue, it completely moronic.
As would be knowing the precise angle my pinky would be expected to project drinking from said cup and saucer.
These things "how well can he eat in the big house with the rich folks" ... and I'm afraid pretty much everybody I grew up with would fail that utterly.
Please tell me the cup and saucer thing or place settings is just a made up example and not a real part of the tests?
Hmmm ... kind of by definition that's not "genetic", but socioeconomic.
Basically it becomes the circular argument of we define "gifted" as the children of parents who can afford to give these children early advantages and exhibit the traits being measured ... and then you can't claim those children who have had additional advantages are "gifted", but "lucky enough to come from privileged backgrounds".
The selection of traits is one thing, the ability to afford to cause the conditions for those traits isn't natural selection.
But, really, there's your answer.
There's tons of important stuff. Every day, there's more stuff. A lot of that stuff is protected by security which was designed and implemented by drunken chimpanzees -- or, as often as not, essentially not secured at all.
There's all that tasty data out there, and data and information is valuable.
So, from the US and Israel making that Stuxnet thing, or the "Interweb of Stuff" producing products with garbage security ... as long as people have digital things, and there is a benefit to getting those things, and security is in the hands of people who may or may not know what they're doing ... you'll find attacking that information carries value.
So, government mandated backdoors or weaknesses in crypto, or incompetently implemented security in commercial products ... these things all make this something which is worth chasing for the entities involved.
If it wasn't worth it, people wouldn't be doing it. Just like all forms of espionage or crime.
I'm pretty sure that, taken across the planet and in smaller scales, you'll find humans are pretty much constantly killing one another.
Those of us living in nice communities in Western countries don't see it as much.
But, really, throughout much of the world, humans killing humans has been a staple of life pretty much forever. There's a lot of places where life is pretty cheap.
At a nation to nation scale it may seem well ordered and small, but on smaller scales I'd venture to say it's pretty pervasive.
I'm betting the number of people who will die today from human to human violence is probably a staggering number.
Bah ... how long were the guys on Wall Street who robbed the world by lying about the junk debt they'd repacked sentenced to? How about the ratings agencies who signed off and said the junk debt was AAA rated? What did they get?
Yes, it's widespread fraud ... but $500 million worldwide is a drop in the bucket compared to what "legitimate" corporations have been doing.
If we hadn't see people do far worse and get away with almost no penalty I'd be doing something other than guffawing and saying "yeah, right".
You can do fraud on much larger scales if you're a corporation and have made the right campaign donations. And you'll be hailed as a fucking hero.
Sure, but look at it this way: way more developers than that have been working away on Linux for the last 20+ years.
My experience with people trying to re-write a similar set of functionality from scratch, and covering all of the corner cases, exceptions, audits, and bug fixes ... that tells me that it takes a LOT longer to write something like that.
So, ignoring the userland stuff, and things which hook into Linux, it's still a massive undertaking to write it, test it, verify it, find all the issues, identify and fix exploits ... all of those things take a lot of time.
I don't think it's all that unrealistic to think that trying to rebuild it from scratch would be a massive undertaking, costing huge sums of money ... because it already was a massive undertaking. A lot of it might have been done without someone directly paying for it, but it took a hell of a lot of resources.
But the 20+ years of who knows how many people which have gone into Linux isn't something you could reproduce quickly. I don't buy that for a minute. You'd have security holes, crash conditions, optimizations, errors, or huge gaps in functionality.
So, in a roundabout way ... thanks to all the people who have made Linux what it is. Because it's far too easy to undervalue it or take it for granted.
Wait, what? Does the Linux Foundation own either of those two things?
Linux isn't "every piece of Gnu software on the planet", and I seriously doubt very much the Linux Foundation either claims to own GNU Hurd, or has anything to do with it being pushed.
Are you perhaps totally confused about what "Linux" is? I'll give you a hint ... it's the core operating system. It's certainly not every piece of GNU software, and it's definitely got nothing to do with GNU Hurd.
If every corporation which relies on Linux as part of its infrastructure had to buy or build every piece of technology required to replace Linux, I should think on a global scale it would be far more than that.
Because a lot of that effort would be duplicated by multiple companies .. and of course the patent litigation by all of the players who seek to claim they invented some piece of technology which predates them.
I can believe $5 billion in this quite easily.
Of course, I can't read the paper since I need to fill out some fscking form from, and that's not happening.
Pity the Linux Foundation doesn't believe in open information.
No, it doesn't ... it allow corporations to change the rules of the game as they see fit, and bypass the market.
Let's be clear here: "Market Forces" in this context is bullshit.
This is corporations changing the market for their own benefit by cajoling politicians into providing a mechanism to undermine the market.
This is the opposite of a free market, this is a rigged game to benefit the people with the most money by bypassing the market.
People who say H1B visas has anything to do with the free market are either lying or delusional.
Because I don't give a fuck about some guy who wrote a piece of software, and his personal manifesto. I don't need to validate his position, or evaluate it for merit -- that's not my problem.
See, I'm not committing a logical fallacy, since I'm not refuting his points ... I am dismissing him out of hand as an irrelevant, whiny little twat who wants to take his ball and go home. He's more than welcome to do that. He can do it for any stupid reason he chooses.
And the rest of the world is free to dismiss him as a crackpot and not give a damn about his crazy rantings.
The reality is, he isn't withholding anything nobody can't live without, and while he's free to do as he chooses with his software ... everyone else is free to not give a fuck.
We certainly don't need to acknowledge, validate, or give credibility to his temper tantrum. That's his damned problem.
If someone said tomorrow I can't use a piece of software because I'm not a Christian, I'm also going to conclude that person is a moron and an asshole, and be equally dismissive of them. But I'm not going to coddle or validate his feelings because he needs to act like a moron and an asshole.
So basically he's a batshit crazy idiot who is ranting publicly and acting like a whiny bitch?
Congratulations, Gangolf Judd ... you're an idiot, and a moron.
And largely irrelevant, from reading this.
Everything about this article suggests some raving idiot sitting in the dark lamenting how the world won't adhere to his bullshit beliefs.
Whatever, and nothing of value was lost.
Until you factor in the time it takes, the nuisance it introduces, and the chance that over time your USB port suffers additional wear and tear.
I mean, you've added nothing of value here ... you might as well have said "why, gee, why not just have a whole second desk and walk over to it?"
Clearly the poster has some specific use cases in mind. And I wouldn't waste my time moving USB ports for the two computers I have on KVM, let around mucking around with it for several computers and monitors -- the more pieces there are the more it becomes a pain in the ass and a waste of time..
As a grumpy old man who sometimes sees a lot of technology as pointless, even I look at your response and think "yeah, let's not do it that way".
Hmmm ... but how often do you do it every day?
I've got two monitors, two computers (laptop and desktop), and a cheap Belkin Flip KVM -- not nearly as complicated as the poster. My laptop is work, my desktop is my own stuff.
My laptop is on the left, and when I use the KVM the middle screen mirrors the main screen of the laptop (bigger, and right in front of me), or is the left screen of the desktop -- the right screen is always my desktop's right screen.
I switch between by desktop and my laptop about 40-50x/day ... all with one button.
Even for my simple setup, having to change my monitor inputs manually would add a crap load of extra time.
How many button presses does it take for you to change inputs on the monitor? If it's more than 1 is starts to become cumbersome. If it's more than 2 it's probably tedious. If it's more than 3 it's probably annoying as hell.
Because they can ... and because people will pay for it.
Paying that kind of money for an OEM Bluetooth keyboard? That's someone who hasn't been paying attention and is easily separated from their money.
Everybody acts like the keyboard with a Surface tablet is some great invention.
The reality is, a cheap Bluetooth keyboard will pair with pretty much anything ... Android, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung. And they've been around for years.
Honestly, I bought a Bluetooth keyboard case for my Nexus 7 for something like $25 ... if you feel you need a keyboard, buy one and stop bitching about it.
It's a well solved problem. For the 99% of the time I don't need a keyboard, it's not really much of a big deal ... and a few times a year I put up the kickstand, turn on the keyboard, and type.
I think I'll wait to see how badly this does on my older Nexus 7.
My experience is Google might want to push it to me, but that the device stands a pretty good chance of being rendered useless with an update which is either badly tested or too damned slow.
Besides, day 1 updates are for suckers who don't realize they get to be the beta testers and find all the problems.
Hmmm ... they make epoxy and etching compound in paste form ... are you suggesting you're a child and will eat all forms of paste?
Sounds like a self correcting problem.
The most likely thing is so that web-pages can have links to their app.
I agree it's idiotic and open for abuse.
I want my browser locked down in a sandbox and largely precluded from interacting with the rest of the OS, but apparently they don't make those.
Why do we keep trusting the web? Because time and time again it proves to be anything but trustworthy.
So when will we start holding ad agencies accountable for what is basically hacking?
This is precisely why I will never have any qualms about blocking every damned ad site I can possibly identify ... because they're all ran by assholes who feel entitled to do anything they wish.
They're untrustworthy, and willing to do anything for a buck. Which means we should be blocking the hell out of this shit.
Boo hoo to anybody who says they need the ad revenue ... unless you plan on being accountable for this shit done by your advertisers, stop expecting us to trust them or you.
The modern version probably includes "is the camera ready?"
'Cuz if it aint on YouTube, it didn't happen.
Oh, come on ... I expected to see an "emulators are for cows" post by now. Someone is slacking off.
Moo.
Not really, it assumes you give a damn.
I can't tell you how many stupid platforms I've been subjected to at work which seem to labor under the bullshit premise that my work, or anybody else's, is going to be improved by "teh soshul medias".
All those things with badges for participation and the like? I hate these things in real life, and I despise them in my work life. It propagates the stupid belief that by adding more volume of pointless content and getting recognized as a "good contributor" that it generates anything of value.
Introversion means you simply don't want 500 Facebook friends, don't see the structure of "social media" as enhancing anything, and actively want no part of it.
Somewhere along the line when companies started using this cap internally as if it was going to save the corporate culture and make us all more productive, they lost the plot. So now you have a bunch of magpies who use it because it's cool and fun, and a bunch of people who can't find anything useful because it's crammed full of inane garbage and notifications that someone liked someone else's post.
I'm not looking for "cool and fun", I'm looking for information to do my job. And I don't want it structured in such a way as to require me to sift through a bunch of "workversations" to find the useful bits among the rubbish. The signal to noise ratio renders the platform largely useless.
If this crap in the workplace feels useless and distracting, I can only imagine that in an educational setting it leaves a lot of kids thinking "why would I do this, how does it help me, and why am I being forced to use this crap?"
Social media is rewarding if you want to be constantly validated as participating in a group and have a video-game level of "accomplishments", and it's utterly useless if you don't. It just ads a layer of pointless crap which has nothing to do with what you're trying to do ... but it satisfies some clueless halfwit who saw a seminar which said that social media would make everything better.
Give me the tools to do my damned job, and don't impose some framework where I have to pretend to want to have a social conversation to extract every single piece of information. Because it makes for terribly organized information which is less useful the more stuff is around it.
Other than making some people feel better about things, I'm not convinced social media helps you accomplish a damned thing.
I sincerely hope the trend that everything is social media ends soon -- because it's annoying as hell, and in my experience, not substantiated in terms of what it actually accomplishes.