I agree that a single anonymous source that was quoted by a journalist stated Kaspersky was a threat. That doesn't make them so.
As for taking those others to court? why bother? If your legal team wastes their time with every single person that says something bad about you you'll go broke litigating them all. It's better to stick to the ones that you can prove actually harm your business. And this one with the US government makes that easy.
If the US government really believes Kaspersky to be a threat, fine, show the evidence. Anything else is just libel.
I didn't say it was easy to be a good manager. Just that only bad managers value hours worked more than output.
In fact I explicitly stated that it was easier to simply monitor hours worked.
And if you honestly believe that anyone who is a high performer must be lying and gaming the system, you're part of the bigger problem. With an attitude like that you likely will have a lot of trouble recruiting and keeping anyone who actually is a high performer.
If they just said "We aren't buying it" that would be fine, But they are saying "Kaspersky software is a security threat" that's a provable claim, that they should have proof before saying.
I can decide not to buy from you, that's fine, but if I tell everyone that you're doing something specific that's unethical, I better have proof to back it up, otherwise it's slander or libel.
Your article (which is paywalled so impossible to read) doesn't do anything to change the facts. The first few lines (which aren't paywalled) imply that the British government's security service did not feel that Kaspersky was enough of a risk to advise Brittons against using it, and states that an anonymous source said that Kaspersky wasn't trustworthy.
So far the US government has never put forward even a single piece of evidence to the contrary, and the part of your article that I could read did not either.
Kaspersky obviously doesn't think there is any evidence or they wouldn't be suing as their odds of success would be near zero.
So it's up to the courts to decide if any evidence actually exists to support the claims of the US government here. Basically this is going to force the US government to either "put up or shut up". Which is what they should have done all along. The government never should have made claims if they weren't willing to back them up with evidence.
This isn't about the right to force the US government to buy their products, this is about the US government slandering them at every chance they get.
This is Kaspersky saying "put up, or shut up". The US government can choose their suppliers, but under US law neither they, nor anyone else, can make false injurious statements about others.
My advice to you? Get over it and quit whining.
Of course the rule of law, truth, and facts, have never meant all that much in the USA.
The Chinese and Russians aren't telling everyone there are security problems with US software. The US on the other hand is doing exactly that.
There's a big difference between not buying something, and telling everyone else that the product is compromised and that they shouldn't buy it either.
Kaspersky is not suing for the former, they're suing for the latter.
If the US government has proof, this should be no problem, but this is Kaspersky saying "put up, or shut up!". Of course actual truth and evidence aren't exactly valued in the USA.
There is something to that actually. Many government fees cost more to collect and process than they earn. I don't think that transit fares are in that category, however I'm sure you'd find that a certain percentage of the fare cost is purely the cost of charging a fare (printing tickets, maintaining machines to sell and validate them, distributing tickets to stores, collecting coins, rolling them, taking them to the bank, reconciling number of riders vs fares collected, etc, etc.) and that the actual revenue lost isn't as high as you think it is.
The government hasn't said that it "Could" be compromised, they've stated repeatedly that it IS compromised. That's a very different thing.
Kaspersky isn't suing them because they aren't buying the software, there'd be no grounds for that. They're suing because the government is making claims about the software that Kaspersky says are false. The burden of proof in such cases always rests on the party making the claim, and that's the US government.
You didn't even read the post you replied to did you?
He specifically stated where he thought the money would come from: - decreased health costs from less pollution - decreased road maintenance costs - time savings for commuters (I'm assuming he meant that this would translate to increased GDP)
Now as to where the balance falls as to cost vs savings, hard to tell, but to dismiss it out of hand as "nothing is free" is somewhat ridiculous when the person has already stated as much in his post and shown where the money would come from.
There's really no telling whether or not this would improve the poor bus service. Once something becomes a pure cost on a balance sheet, with no offsetting profit, it's really hard for politicians to justify pouring more money in to it.
At the moment, you justify increased bus service based on profitable routes. If a route is running at capacity, it generates a profit from ridership and you can justify increasing the number of busses on that route. But if increased ridership does not equate to increased profit on the route, why would you spend more money to put another bus on? (and yes, I know that overall most transit systems lose money rather than make money, but that's primarily because many routes do not run anywhere near capacity, those are also not the routes that would be considered for increased capacity. The routes that DO operate full do make a profit and hence tend to get increased capacity)
Maintenance is mainly necessary because of wear by heavy vehicles. That is trucks (which would still be there, or might even increase because of less busy roads) and busses (which would definitely increase).
The most expensive part though is in the construction of roads, and increasing capacity of them, this is far more expensive than routine maintenance, and that all drops significantly as you carry more people in fewer lanes of traffic, and with fewer large interchanges, etc.
Truck traffic also will not increase because of less crowded roadways, heavy trucks don't just drive around for the sake of doing so, they take specific items to specific places, there's no reason to believe that less crowded roads would suddenly require more products to get to more places.
Exactly, just like they currently pay for the roads that the cars are driving on now.
From a strictly cost standpoint you'd have to see if the reduced maintenance on infrastructure for cars, as well as the reduced costs to the healthcare system from lower pollution and fewer collisions offsets the cost to provide the public transportation system. There's also a likely GDP boost as cost of getting to work is no longer an impediment to the working poor.
Of course there may be other benefits that don't show up on your budget statement, such as increased happiness of your citizens, cleaner air, safer streets, etc.
except the decision to add buses becomes much more one about cost than utilization at that point. Now they justify adding buses by whether there are enough riders to cover the cost. If the riders aren't paying for it then they can no longer do that and it's all a matter of how much the city is willing to pay, and that usually isn't much.
It's far easier to manage by looking at the timeclock than it is to evaluate the actual productivity of your employees. If you do the former, you have to either have everyone in the office, or have all sorts of invasive spying stuff loaded on their company gear to track their every move. If you do the latter, you don't care where they work, when they work, or even how many hours a day, only whether they produce the right quantity and quality of output.
Unfortunately many managers are still of the mindset that 8+hours a day is good, less than 8 is bad, and what you managed to do in that time is secondary.
Depends where you are, but I can definitely foresee buses full of homeless people in the city centre areas in the winter. Of course that may serve to shed some light on a different problem and get some attention there.
I bet if another country took similar action against a US company, that the US would retaliate with sanctions, and it could easily escalate to a full trade war. The US seems to think that everything they do must be virtuous, while everything a company from Russia does must be evil.
How about instead we look at actual evidence? or is that just too hard a concept for the "land of the free, home of the brave"?
What about discovery on the other side? Shouldn't the government have to show their proof that Kaspersky software is compromised? So far the government has accused Kaspersky of a lot of things, but has never once shown even a shred of proof. Isn't it just as likely that the government should fold during the discovery?
New features used to mean new functionality that made people happy. New features now usually mean reduced functionality that makes the company more money.
There's a reason people aren't wishing for new features any more.
No, AMP would be a horrible idea. Stopping this charade that mobile devices should get inferior pages on every website instead of the full experience on the other hand would be a good idea.
Cell phones these days have almost as much processing power as full computers. They often have higher resolution screens, and are fully capable of using the internet, Unfortunately a large percentage of the internet is crippled when you try to browse it without manually telling each webpage that you want desktop mode, and even then many sites refuse to oblige and continue to serve the crippled version of their site.
There should be no such thing as a "mobile" website. There should just be "websites" because I have never once met a desktop site that didn't work on my phone, and I have never once met a "mobile" site that was better in any way than the desktop version of the same site when accessing them from my phone.
AMP needs to die. Mobile pages need to die. Let me access the actual site, by default, on my phone!
They could start by not letting it run ANY code... This isn't a hard concept, nobody expects their email to run applications, or connect out to remote servers, or anything like that. The most anyone will ever want from their email is some formatting (bold, italic, colour, font size) that's easy to implement without adding the capability to run full scripting languages and reach out to every remote ad server on the planet.
The problem isn't that companies don't know how to make it secure, it's that their business model relies on it being insecure. If email clients refused to reach out to remote servers when displaying a message, the companies couldn't track everything you do. If they didn't run scripts the companies would be limited to static ads.
Of course this is really the biggest problem with almost all innovation right now. The question is no longer "how do we make X better" but instead "how do we make X more profitable" It used to be that people assumed that doing the former would lead to the latter, now there's no attempt to even consider the former. This leads to thousands of non-interoperable walled gardens full of garbage nobody wants that is actively hostile to the users.
Also youtube.......I don't understand people who'd rather watch a video than read a transcript.
I'd rather watch a video than read a transcript of the video. But I'd far rather read a well laid out article on the subject than either of those options.
A transcript has all the limitations of the video format, but without any of the advantages i.e. it must be extremely brief, usually to the point of omitting important details, but at the same time a transcript misses all the visual detail that can add so much to so many things. Meanwhile a well written article can give you more detail in the same amount of time, and yet can also include images that illustrate the points nicely. and even better, an article is searchable, so if I want to go back later and find an important bit I don't have to watch the whole video again.
But nobody wants to READ any more, just shovel that content into the eyeballs!
The question really becomes, which do you distrust more, your local ISP, or the ISP of the location you're hosting your VPN. If you trust neither, then there's no point bothering.
VPN is useful for 2 things: 1) creating a secure link between 2 separate locations over the public internet where you can't afford dedicated transport (e.g. My home, and my office) 2) shifting your traffic from an ISP that's a known bad actor, to one that's only a suspected bad actor (because be honest, are there really any ISPs that are "known good"?)
Number 2 is still relevant for many people, but VPNs are far too commonly used by people who don't understand the technology to try to simply make everything safe, when all it really does in most cases is add complication, cost, and latency.
And remember, unless the endpoint of the VPN is your own, it's ALWAYS an actor with unknown motives. I don't see why you'd trust any of the "VPN Providers" out there. You have no idea what they are doing with your information, and no line on their website about not logging means a thing as several have already been shown to be lying through their teeth about it.
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I agree that a single anonymous source that was quoted by a journalist stated Kaspersky was a threat. That doesn't make them so.
As for taking those others to court? why bother? If your legal team wastes their time with every single person that says something bad about you you'll go broke litigating them all. It's better to stick to the ones that you can prove actually harm your business. And this one with the US government makes that easy.
If the US government really believes Kaspersky to be a threat, fine, show the evidence. Anything else is just libel.
I didn't say it was easy to be a good manager. Just that only bad managers value hours worked more than output.
In fact I explicitly stated that it was easier to simply monitor hours worked.
And if you honestly believe that anyone who is a high performer must be lying and gaming the system, you're part of the bigger problem. With an attitude like that you likely will have a lot of trouble recruiting and keeping anyone who actually is a high performer.
If they just said "We aren't buying it" that would be fine,
But they are saying "Kaspersky software is a security threat" that's a provable claim, that they should have proof before saying.
I can decide not to buy from you, that's fine, but if I tell everyone that you're doing something specific that's unethical, I better have proof to back it up, otherwise it's slander or libel.
Your article (which is paywalled so impossible to read) doesn't do anything to change the facts. The first few lines (which aren't paywalled) imply that the British government's security service did not feel that Kaspersky was enough of a risk to advise Brittons against using it, and states that an anonymous source said that Kaspersky wasn't trustworthy.
So far the US government has never put forward even a single piece of evidence to the contrary, and the part of your article that I could read did not either.
Kaspersky obviously doesn't think there is any evidence or they wouldn't be suing as their odds of success would be near zero.
So it's up to the courts to decide if any evidence actually exists to support the claims of the US government here. Basically this is going to force the US government to either "put up or shut up". Which is what they should have done all along. The government never should have made claims if they weren't willing to back them up with evidence.
This isn't about the right to force the US government to buy their products, this is about the US government slandering them at every chance they get.
This is Kaspersky saying "put up, or shut up". The US government can choose their suppliers, but under US law neither they, nor anyone else, can make false injurious statements about others.
My advice to you? Get over it and quit whining.
Of course the rule of law, truth, and facts, have never meant all that much in the USA.
The Chinese and Russians aren't telling everyone there are security problems with US software. The US on the other hand is doing exactly that.
There's a big difference between not buying something, and telling everyone else that the product is compromised and that they shouldn't buy it either.
Kaspersky is not suing for the former, they're suing for the latter.
If the US government has proof, this should be no problem, but this is Kaspersky saying "put up, or shut up!". Of course actual truth and evidence aren't exactly valued in the USA.
There is something to that actually. Many government fees cost more to collect and process than they earn. I don't think that transit fares are in that category, however I'm sure you'd find that a certain percentage of the fare cost is purely the cost of charging a fare (printing tickets, maintaining machines to sell and validate them, distributing tickets to stores, collecting coins, rolling them, taking them to the bank, reconciling number of riders vs fares collected, etc, etc.) and that the actual revenue lost isn't as high as you think it is.
The government hasn't said that it "Could" be compromised, they've stated repeatedly that it IS compromised. That's a very different thing.
Kaspersky isn't suing them because they aren't buying the software, there'd be no grounds for that. They're suing because the government is making claims about the software that Kaspersky says are false. The burden of proof in such cases always rests on the party making the claim, and that's the US government.
You didn't even read the post you replied to did you?
He specifically stated where he thought the money would come from:
- decreased health costs from less pollution
- decreased road maintenance costs
- time savings for commuters (I'm assuming he meant that this would translate to increased GDP)
Now as to where the balance falls as to cost vs savings, hard to tell, but to dismiss it out of hand as "nothing is free" is somewhat ridiculous when the person has already stated as much in his post and shown where the money would come from.
There's really no telling whether or not this would improve the poor bus service. Once something becomes a pure cost on a balance sheet, with no offsetting profit, it's really hard for politicians to justify pouring more money in to it.
At the moment, you justify increased bus service based on profitable routes. If a route is running at capacity, it generates a profit from ridership and you can justify increasing the number of busses on that route. But if increased ridership does not equate to increased profit on the route, why would you spend more money to put another bus on?
(and yes, I know that overall most transit systems lose money rather than make money, but that's primarily because many routes do not run anywhere near capacity, those are also not the routes that would be considered for increased capacity. The routes that DO operate full do make a profit and hence tend to get increased capacity)
Maintenance is mainly necessary because of wear by heavy vehicles. That is trucks (which would still be there, or might even increase because of less busy roads) and busses (which would definitely increase).
The most expensive part though is in the construction of roads, and increasing capacity of them, this is far more expensive than routine maintenance, and that all drops significantly as you carry more people in fewer lanes of traffic, and with fewer large interchanges, etc.
Truck traffic also will not increase because of less crowded roadways, heavy trucks don't just drive around for the sake of doing so, they take specific items to specific places, there's no reason to believe that less crowded roads would suddenly require more products to get to more places.
Exactly, just like they currently pay for the roads that the cars are driving on now.
From a strictly cost standpoint you'd have to see if the reduced maintenance on infrastructure for cars, as well as the reduced costs to the healthcare system from lower pollution and fewer collisions offsets the cost to provide the public transportation system. There's also a likely GDP boost as cost of getting to work is no longer an impediment to the working poor.
Of course there may be other benefits that don't show up on your budget statement, such as increased happiness of your citizens, cleaner air, safer streets, etc.
except the decision to add buses becomes much more one about cost than utilization at that point. Now they justify adding buses by whether there are enough riders to cover the cost. If the riders aren't paying for it then they can no longer do that and it's all a matter of how much the city is willing to pay, and that usually isn't much.
depends where you live. This week where I live 6km would be extremely miserable at -29c with 40cm of snow. whether you walk, or bike.
Lazy Management.
It's far easier to manage by looking at the timeclock than it is to evaluate the actual productivity of your employees. If you do the former, you have to either have everyone in the office, or have all sorts of invasive spying stuff loaded on their company gear to track their every move. If you do the latter, you don't care where they work, when they work, or even how many hours a day, only whether they produce the right quantity and quality of output.
Unfortunately many managers are still of the mindset that 8+hours a day is good, less than 8 is bad, and what you managed to do in that time is secondary.
Depends where you are, but I can definitely foresee buses full of homeless people in the city centre areas in the winter. Of course that may serve to shed some light on a different problem and get some attention there.
I bet if another country took similar action against a US company, that the US would retaliate with sanctions, and it could easily escalate to a full trade war. The US seems to think that everything they do must be virtuous, while everything a company from Russia does must be evil.
How about instead we look at actual evidence? or is that just too hard a concept for the "land of the free, home of the brave"?
What about discovery on the other side? Shouldn't the government have to show their proof that Kaspersky software is compromised? So far the government has accused Kaspersky of a lot of things, but has never once shown even a shred of proof. Isn't it just as likely that the government should fold during the discovery?
It used to be enough to save all your emails. Now you need to save screenshots of all of your emails.
But don't worry, they're working on developing AMP for screenshots, coming soon to a computer near you!
New features used to mean new functionality that made people happy. New features now usually mean reduced functionality that makes the company more money.
There's a reason people aren't wishing for new features any more.
No, AMP would be a horrible idea.
Stopping this charade that mobile devices should get inferior pages on every website instead of the full experience on the other hand would be a good idea.
Cell phones these days have almost as much processing power as full computers. They often have higher resolution screens, and are fully capable of using the internet, Unfortunately a large percentage of the internet is crippled when you try to browse it without manually telling each webpage that you want desktop mode, and even then many sites refuse to oblige and continue to serve the crippled version of their site.
There should be no such thing as a "mobile" website. There should just be "websites" because I have never once met a desktop site that didn't work on my phone, and I have never once met a "mobile" site that was better in any way than the desktop version of the same site when accessing them from my phone.
AMP needs to die.
Mobile pages need to die.
Let me access the actual site, by default, on my phone!
They could start by not letting it run ANY code...
This isn't a hard concept, nobody expects their email to run applications, or connect out to remote servers, or anything like that. The most anyone will ever want from their email is some formatting (bold, italic, colour, font size) that's easy to implement without adding the capability to run full scripting languages and reach out to every remote ad server on the planet.
The problem isn't that companies don't know how to make it secure, it's that their business model relies on it being insecure. If email clients refused to reach out to remote servers when displaying a message, the companies couldn't track everything you do. If they didn't run scripts the companies would be limited to static ads.
Of course this is really the biggest problem with almost all innovation right now. The question is no longer "how do we make X better" but instead "how do we make X more profitable" It used to be that people assumed that doing the former would lead to the latter, now there's no attempt to even consider the former. This leads to thousands of non-interoperable walled gardens full of garbage nobody wants that is actively hostile to the users.
Also youtube.......I don't understand people who'd rather watch a video than read a transcript.
I'd rather watch a video than read a transcript of the video. But I'd far rather read a well laid out article on the subject than either of those options.
A transcript has all the limitations of the video format, but without any of the advantages i.e. it must be extremely brief, usually to the point of omitting important details, but at the same time a transcript misses all the visual detail that can add so much to so many things. Meanwhile a well written article can give you more detail in the same amount of time, and yet can also include images that illustrate the points nicely. and even better, an article is searchable, so if I want to go back later and find an important bit I don't have to watch the whole video again.
But nobody wants to READ any more, just shovel that content into the eyeballs!
The question really becomes, which do you distrust more, your local ISP, or the ISP of the location you're hosting your VPN. If you trust neither, then there's no point bothering.
VPN is useful for 2 things:
1) creating a secure link between 2 separate locations over the public internet where you can't afford dedicated transport (e.g. My home, and my office)
2) shifting your traffic from an ISP that's a known bad actor, to one that's only a suspected bad actor (because be honest, are there really any ISPs that are "known good"?)
Number 2 is still relevant for many people, but VPNs are far too commonly used by people who don't understand the technology to try to simply make everything safe, when all it really does in most cases is add complication, cost, and latency.
And remember, unless the endpoint of the VPN is your own, it's ALWAYS an actor with unknown motives. I don't see why you'd trust any of the "VPN Providers" out there. You have no idea what they are doing with your information, and no line on their website about not logging means a thing as several have already been shown to be lying through their teeth about it.