Looking to Trump as a saviour from corruption is like believing that you can extinguish a fire by dousing it with gasoline.
I can't stomach the thought of actually voting for Trump, but if it comes to either him or Hillary, I'm hoping that he wins for just the reasoning that you mention.
I think that it's time to start pouring gasoline on this fire and either burn up all of the dead rotten wood at once or at least stoke the flames to the point that people wake up to the fact that we should actually do something to address the endemic corruption. Keeping the corruption just below the threshold for outrage only allows it to spread and calcify and ultimately makes it harder to get rid of.
When the national culture allows guns and an 'entitled to murder' mentality, perhaps one should be surprised that more social cliques aren't committing murder.
When you're surprised that reality doesn't fit your interpretation of it, perhaps you should rethink your interpretation and not be surprised at reality. (read: There is no "national culture" of 'entitled to murder'.)
the installation, maintenance, and necessary upgrades of essential infrastructure shouldn't be dependent on the expectation of profit by a private entity.
Even if that infrastructure were publicly owned and the tasks you described were contracted out to private, profit-seeking entities?
Absolutely. The biggest problem is not that profit is added onto the expense of doing the work. The biggest problem is that the work is not done (infrastructure installed, maintained, upgraded) because it is decided that there is more profit in not doing so. See my example about stagnating internet deployments. The decision to invest in essential infrastructure should not rest with entities who may choose that they can profit more from allowing the infrastructure to stagnate or decay.
we see stagnating internet deployments because it's more profitable for the entrenched players to not upgrade the infrastructure
Actually, data caps give ISPs an economic incentive to upgrade everyone's connections as a way to help them hit the cap as quickly and easily as possible.
Data caps are an deliberately implemented artificial scarcity that only persist because of the lack of competition in the ISP business. They are not an example of a healthy free market. They are quite literally rent-seeking behavior and the sign of a broken market.
utilities...are better addressed by just paying for them out of the collective pot
So our electric bills should be paid out of our taxes instead of charging people in proportion to the benefit they receive?
Not any more than I believe that the gasoline needed to drive on public roads should be paid out of our taxes.
People should pay for the use of finite resources, but the installation, maintenance, and necessary upgrades of essential infrastructure shouldn't be dependent on the expectation of profit by a private entity. The capture of essential infrastructure for extracting profit is epitomized by the robber barons of the 13th century, but the same thing has happened since then and it is never good for society as a whole.
Back on topic, we see stagnating internet deployments because it's more profitable for the entrenched players to not upgrade the infrastructure, the barrier to entry is very high in that industry, and any attempts to upgrade infrastructure by public entities is blocked by laws and in court. How is this an ideal outcome?
But setting the price at market equilibrium is how we solve the economic problem (too many wants for too few resources) in a capitalist society. How would you solve it?
Realize that there are certain issues, such as public infrastructure and utilities, that are better addressed by just paying for them out of the collective pot than subjecting them to market inefficiencies and the added overhead of profits. (ie, build another lane)
The idea that every need of society has to be used as a vehicle for milking the population by profiteering rent-seekers is just as twisted as the idea that every need can be met though central planning and an overbearing government.
In Norway Ive managed my own savings account since 7-8 yrs old. Didnt get much allowance but saved up for C64 and all my PCs from gifts.
I think it's important that the allowance be small. It should be large enough that it's not just a joke, but too small to let the child afford anything they want all of the time. That helps teach saving, budgeting, and prioritizing what one wants. Windfalls, like from gifts, can be saved or spent and are an important aspect of the whole thing, too.
I like how the author made the distinction between donkeys and horses there. Somebody clearly had a lot of personal experience with equine genitalia and emissions. A biblical basis for the proto-furry, perhaps?
The police also know that they're participating in a study involving wearing these cameras and may have been on their best behavior because they knew that they were being observed. Maybe their superiors told them to be on their best behavior because the number of complaints against them was being closely investigated.
Maybe they were on their best behavior when not wearing the cameras because they wanted to spoil any correlation between their good behavior and wearing the cameras, but it was instead interpreted as the cameras having a more pervasive influence.
It's hard to properly blind the participants in this study, so it's hard to account for all of the unexpected influences.
Officer john wears the camera one week and gets 3 complaints. Next week he doesn't wear the camera and gets 30 complaints. It's safe to infer he behaves like an asshole when off-camera, so, to counter that, he is NOT an asshole even when not wearing the camera.
An alternate explanation would be that people don't make as many false complaints when there's video evidence available.
Likely, but complaints dropped even when the officer wasn't wearing a camera: "But even more surprising is that the data suggests everyone is on their best behavior whether the cameras are present or not... Officers were randomly assigned to wear or not wear cameras week by week (about half would be wearing them any given week), and had to keep them on during all encounters."
If the non-AOSP parts aren't excessively intrusive and destroying the experience
The non-AOSP parts are the parts that define the Google "experience" of being excessively intrusive and datamining the shit out of you. Seriously, how do you think that this "assistant" works without being excessively intrusive?
...the company says the biggest selling point of the phones is Google Assistant, which will be available to users wherever they go.
Smells more like simple supply and demand to me. One would think one of the largest for-profit corporations on the planet would recognize a revenue stream when they see it.
Exactly! The next step is to launch Zuckerberg into orbit so that he's outside of any jurisdiction! Maybe sometime afterward somebody can send him a habitat and some oxygen... or not.
He's talking about an authentication token, not SSO. A real cryptographic token with take a challenge from the website and sign it with your key (possibly after entering a PIN) to prove that you are in possession of the token (and know the PIN). There's no way that this is tied to any one provider, because it's not SSO. (See PIV, OpenPGP card or any number of similar approaches.)
The tokens in use now are all TOTP or HOTP-type tokens where you generate a hash that proves that you and the authentication server both know the same secret. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook's systems are incompatible because there's no secret that you know that they don't. Making them work together would mean sharing the means to log into your account with all of them (and every shady website that you want to use the token with).
We also realize that that 96% - they are not the ones that end up shooting unarmed civilians.
No, but an overwhelming majority of them seem to be the ones who doctor their reports and lie in court to cheat justice for the 4% that end up shooting unarmed civilians. Most non-police wouldn't participate in coverups to let their co-workers get away with murder, yet every unjustified police homicide seems to have elements of a coverup surrounding it.
Obstruction of justice, perjury, and accessory to murder may not be quite as bad a crime as murder, but the enormous percentage of police who seem to be alright with committing them aren't "almost EXACTLY as honest as your average employed civilian". The police departments are either selecting for people more likely to cover up major crimes committed by fellow officers or they are training them to do so. That behavior is way more rotten than your ordinary person is comfortable with.
HOW THE FUCK is Chelsea Clinton on the board of anything?
Are you serious? She's on the board of anything for the exact same reason that anybody is on the board if anything. How did you think that people got on these boards?
VLANs are suggestions, not security. Devices are free to ignore them and many do.
Wish folks would stop suggesting VLANs like they are any thing more.
He was talking about managed switches, so he probably intended the VLANs to be enforced by the switch (and tagged per port) and not by the shady IoT device. The device is free to ignore them all it wants, but it's not seeing any packets from outside of that VLAN and its packets aren't going anywhere that isn't on the same VLAN.
Telling people to put their baby monitor in the DMZ is not going to solve any of their concerns and is also not going to keep them from being part of a botnet.
Most of the devices in their normal network aren't going to be quite so shittily secured by design. You want to protect your internal network from IoT devices, sure, but you really want to protect those IoT devices from the internet at large.
"The correct thing to do isn't as clear as you might suppose. Morally, it may be more correct to pirate their content then buy a t-shirt or something from them, because they'll see most of that money."
Morally it's quite clear, you simply don't consume the content. Justifying theft because of (supposed) shady business practices is not remotely moral.
Not listening to your favorite musician's music hurts them far more than pirating it does, so even that isn't morally quite clear. If you simply don't consume the content, you're considerably less likely to ever buy their merchandise or attend any of their concerts (and financially benefit them) and you're much less likely to indirectly turn others onto their music.
Again, I'm not condoning piracy, but it really isn't as simple as you make it out to be.
Your continual use of, "Keep on hating though", to try to dismiss my reasonable complaints as the emotional product of a "hater" is what made you sound like a shill. The fact that you're trying to deflect any responsibility from your industry to the end users as just "hating" is pretty shill-like behavior, you must admit.
From my point of view, I have absolutely no control of my router at all from the configuration pages, but I can see from the logs that stuff is pushed from Comcast. I bought the router from Comcast and it appears identical to the one I was renting before, down to the model number printed on the sticker. They could give me a static IP with the rented modem (remotely, without requiring physical contact with the modem), but not with the modem that they sold me and I need to start paying them $120/year (on top of the static IPs) to have that functionality back. It's a business account and the (surprisingly knowledgeable and helpful) phone techs claim that the policy of requiring a leased modem is an issue of policy and not a technical issue.
But you'll jump in to defend your industry without knowing any of the specifics of this case and call me a hater instead of politely explaining why everything I've observed is not actually true.
Yeah, I'm sure it's just people hating on the poor cable companies and nothing that they're doing. Comcast specifically lists which devices they support and to what extent. You can buy the exact same model of modem that Comcast rents for about six months worth of rental fees and you the owner of the modem have the exact same amount of control over secret keys and configuration and whatnot as the rental modems (ie none). They can and do push configuration and firmware updates to your privately owned modem just as they would their own.
But I'm sure it's all just me hating on poor Comcast and none of these actual facts instead. Fucking shill.
A nice improvement would be doing away with the "guns in your face" part. Even if this couple had been the perps that the cops were looking for, what part of of "posting child porn" necessitates an early morning armed raid? Do cops not know how to interact with the public at all anymore besides by kicking down doors and shooting their pets?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Comcast intentionally configured their network to reject connections from DOCSIS 2.0 modems even if they were supposed to still work, in hopes that some people who owned modems would start renting (or just to punish people for having the audacity not to rent). It's just the kind of thing those criminal, corrupt fuckers would do.
They pull the same crap if you try to get a static IP, too. They insist that they can only issue static IPs to modems that they own, even though they are completely capable of managing and pushing configurations to any connected modem (which they regularly do, as you can see in the modem's logs) and you can buy the same model of modem that they rent out.
System requirements: Android 2.3 and up, with Google Play Services.
If you want privacy from Google's snooping, use a messenger that requires that Google have closed source system-level services running on your phone and makes extensive use of Google's services for key exchange!
For that matter, the internal culture of the company is such that employees would call it out if the FCC's auditors didn't.
The internal culture that "decided the performance boost from permanently stored messages was worth giving up privacy benefits of transient storage"? The internal culture made up of people who voluntarily chose to work for the largest personal data-mining advertising company in the world? The internal culture of the company that, as you just pointed out, has to be continually audited by the FCC because of previous privacy abuses?
Yeah, I have a hard time putting faith in the integrity and commitment to privacy of the internal culture of fucking Google.
There's a pretty damn easy way to measure fat vs muscle and most people (especially those of the opposite sex) are pretty good at doing so. Even if you're a big lad who still has more visible fat than muscle, any increase in muscle makes a noticeable difference in the way you look and move.
A friend of mine who was pretty big and soft started climbing with me and you could start seeing the difference pretty quicly. Most people can tell the difference between big and soft and big and and strong. You also start feeling better, which helps keep your motivation up. Exercise is only part of a complete weight loss regimen, but it's worth doing on its own, too. It's been the best medicine for my chronic crippling depression.
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Looking to Trump as a saviour from corruption is like believing that you can extinguish a fire by dousing it with gasoline.
I can't stomach the thought of actually voting for Trump, but if it comes to either him or Hillary, I'm hoping that he wins for just the reasoning that you mention.
I think that it's time to start pouring gasoline on this fire and either burn up all of the dead rotten wood at once or at least stoke the flames to the point that people wake up to the fact that we should actually do something to address the endemic corruption. Keeping the corruption just below the threshold for outrage only allows it to spread and calcify and ultimately makes it harder to get rid of.
When the national culture allows guns and an 'entitled to murder' mentality, perhaps one should be surprised that more social cliques aren't committing murder.
When you're surprised that reality doesn't fit your interpretation of it, perhaps you should rethink your interpretation and not be surprised at reality. (read: There is no "national culture" of 'entitled to murder'.)
the installation, maintenance, and necessary upgrades of essential infrastructure shouldn't be dependent on the expectation of profit by a private entity.
Even if that infrastructure were publicly owned and the tasks you described were contracted out to private, profit-seeking entities?
Absolutely. The biggest problem is not that profit is added onto the expense of doing the work. The biggest problem is that the work is not done (infrastructure installed, maintained, upgraded) because it is decided that there is more profit in not doing so. See my example about stagnating internet deployments. The decision to invest in essential infrastructure should not rest with entities who may choose that they can profit more from allowing the infrastructure to stagnate or decay.
we see stagnating internet deployments because it's more profitable for the entrenched players to not upgrade the infrastructure
Actually, data caps give ISPs an economic incentive to upgrade everyone's connections as a way to help them hit the cap as quickly and easily as possible.
Data caps are an deliberately implemented artificial scarcity that only persist because of the lack of competition in the ISP business. They are not an example of a healthy free market. They are quite literally rent-seeking behavior and the sign of a broken market.
So our electric bills should be paid out of our taxes instead of charging people in proportion to the benefit they receive?
Not any more than I believe that the gasoline needed to drive on public roads should be paid out of our taxes.
People should pay for the use of finite resources, but the installation, maintenance, and necessary upgrades of essential infrastructure shouldn't be dependent on the expectation of profit by a private entity. The capture of essential infrastructure for extracting profit is epitomized by the robber barons of the 13th century, but the same thing has happened since then and it is never good for society as a whole.
Back on topic, we see stagnating internet deployments because it's more profitable for the entrenched players to not upgrade the infrastructure, the barrier to entry is very high in that industry, and any attempts to upgrade infrastructure by public entities is blocked by laws and in court. How is this an ideal outcome?
But setting the price at market equilibrium is how we solve the economic problem (too many wants for too few resources) in a capitalist society. How would you solve it?
Realize that there are certain issues, such as public infrastructure and utilities, that are better addressed by just paying for them out of the collective pot than subjecting them to market inefficiencies and the added overhead of profits. (ie, build another lane)
The idea that every need of society has to be used as a vehicle for milking the population by profiteering rent-seekers is just as twisted as the idea that every need can be met though central planning and an overbearing government.
In Norway Ive managed my own savings account since 7-8 yrs old. Didnt get much allowance but saved up for C64 and all my PCs from gifts.
I think it's important that the allowance be small. It should be large enough that it's not just a joke, but too small to let the child afford anything they want all of the time. That helps teach saving, budgeting, and prioritizing what one wants. Windfalls, like from gifts, can be saved or spent and are an important aspect of the whole thing, too.
I like how the author made the distinction between donkeys and horses there. Somebody clearly had a lot of personal experience with equine genitalia and emissions. A biblical basis for the proto-furry, perhaps?
The police also know that they're participating in a study involving wearing these cameras and may have been on their best behavior because they knew that they were being observed. Maybe their superiors told them to be on their best behavior because the number of complaints against them was being closely investigated.
Maybe they were on their best behavior when not wearing the cameras because they wanted to spoil any correlation between their good behavior and wearing the cameras, but it was instead interpreted as the cameras having a more pervasive influence.
It's hard to properly blind the participants in this study, so it's hard to account for all of the unexpected influences.
Officer john wears the camera one week and gets 3 complaints. Next week he doesn't wear the camera and gets 30 complaints. It's safe to infer he behaves like an asshole when off-camera, so, to counter that, he is NOT an asshole even when not wearing the camera.
An alternate explanation would be that people don't make as many false complaints when there's video evidence available.
Likely, but complaints dropped even when the officer wasn't wearing a camera: "But even more surprising is that the data suggests everyone is on their best behavior whether the cameras are present or not... Officers were randomly assigned to wear or not wear cameras week by week (about half would be wearing them any given week), and had to keep them on during all encounters."
If the non-AOSP parts aren't excessively intrusive and destroying the experience
The non-AOSP parts are the parts that define the Google "experience" of being excessively intrusive and datamining the shit out of you. Seriously, how do you think that this "assistant" works without being excessively intrusive?
Smells more like simple supply and demand to me. One would think one of the largest for-profit corporations on the planet would recognize a revenue stream when they see it.
Exactly! The next step is to launch Zuckerberg into orbit so that he's outside of any jurisdiction! Maybe sometime afterward somebody can send him a habitat and some oxygen... or not.
I'm assuming he meant to put "lose" that money, with the scare quotes. Profitable businesses "losing" money is not exactly a new phenomenon.
He's talking about an authentication token, not SSO. A real cryptographic token with take a challenge from the website and sign it with your key (possibly after entering a PIN) to prove that you are in possession of the token (and know the PIN). There's no way that this is tied to any one provider, because it's not SSO. (See PIV, OpenPGP card or any number of similar approaches.)
The tokens in use now are all TOTP or HOTP-type tokens where you generate a hash that proves that you and the authentication server both know the same secret. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook's systems are incompatible because there's no secret that you know that they don't. Making them work together would mean sharing the means to log into your account with all of them (and every shady website that you want to use the token with).
We also realize that that 96% - they are not the ones that end up shooting unarmed civilians.
No, but an overwhelming majority of them seem to be the ones who doctor their reports and lie in court to cheat justice for the 4% that end up shooting unarmed civilians. Most non-police wouldn't participate in coverups to let their co-workers get away with murder, yet every unjustified police homicide seems to have elements of a coverup surrounding it.
Obstruction of justice, perjury, and accessory to murder may not be quite as bad a crime as murder, but the enormous percentage of police who seem to be alright with committing them aren't "almost EXACTLY as honest as your average employed civilian". The police departments are either selecting for people more likely to cover up major crimes committed by fellow officers or they are training them to do so. That behavior is way more rotten than your ordinary person is comfortable with.
HOW THE FUCK is Chelsea Clinton on the board of anything?
Are you serious? She's on the board of anything for the exact same reason that anybody is on the board if anything. How did you think that people got on these boards?
VLANs are suggestions, not security. Devices are free to ignore them and many do.
Wish folks would stop suggesting VLANs like they are any thing more.
He was talking about managed switches, so he probably intended the VLANs to be enforced by the switch (and tagged per port) and not by the shady IoT device. The device is free to ignore them all it wants, but it's not seeing any packets from outside of that VLAN and its packets aren't going anywhere that isn't on the same VLAN.
Telling people to put their baby monitor in the DMZ is not going to solve any of their concerns and is also not going to keep them from being part of a botnet.
Most of the devices in their normal network aren't going to be quite so shittily secured by design. You want to protect your internal network from IoT devices, sure, but you really want to protect those IoT devices from the internet at large.
"The correct thing to do isn't as clear as you might suppose. Morally, it may be more correct to pirate their content then buy a t-shirt or something from them, because they'll see most of that money."
Morally it's quite clear, you simply don't consume the content. Justifying theft because of (supposed) shady business practices is not remotely moral.
Not listening to your favorite musician's music hurts them far more than pirating it does, so even that isn't morally quite clear. If you simply don't consume the content, you're considerably less likely to ever buy their merchandise or attend any of their concerts (and financially benefit them) and you're much less likely to indirectly turn others onto their music.
Again, I'm not condoning piracy, but it really isn't as simple as you make it out to be.
Your continual use of, "Keep on hating though", to try to dismiss my reasonable complaints as the emotional product of a "hater" is what made you sound like a shill. The fact that you're trying to deflect any responsibility from your industry to the end users as just "hating" is pretty shill-like behavior, you must admit.
From my point of view, I have absolutely no control of my router at all from the configuration pages, but I can see from the logs that stuff is pushed from Comcast. I bought the router from Comcast and it appears identical to the one I was renting before, down to the model number printed on the sticker. They could give me a static IP with the rented modem (remotely, without requiring physical contact with the modem), but not with the modem that they sold me and I need to start paying them $120/year (on top of the static IPs) to have that functionality back. It's a business account and the (surprisingly knowledgeable and helpful) phone techs claim that the policy of requiring a leased modem is an issue of policy and not a technical issue.
But you'll jump in to defend your industry without knowing any of the specifics of this case and call me a hater instead of politely explaining why everything I've observed is not actually true.
Yeah, I'm sure it's just people hating on the poor cable companies and nothing that they're doing. Comcast specifically lists which devices they support and to what extent. You can buy the exact same model of modem that Comcast rents for about six months worth of rental fees and you the owner of the modem have the exact same amount of control over secret keys and configuration and whatnot as the rental modems (ie none). They can and do push configuration and firmware updates to your privately owned modem just as they would their own.
But I'm sure it's all just me hating on poor Comcast and none of these actual facts instead. Fucking shill.
A nice improvement would be doing away with the "guns in your face" part. Even if this couple had been the perps that the cops were looking for, what part of of "posting child porn" necessitates an early morning armed raid? Do cops not know how to interact with the public at all anymore besides by kicking down doors and shooting their pets?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Comcast intentionally configured their network to reject connections from DOCSIS 2.0 modems even if they were supposed to still work, in hopes that some people who owned modems would start renting (or just to punish people for having the audacity not to rent). It's just the kind of thing those criminal, corrupt fuckers would do.
They pull the same crap if you try to get a static IP, too. They insist that they can only issue static IPs to modems that they own, even though they are completely capable of managing and pushing configurations to any connected modem (which they regularly do, as you can see in the modem's logs) and you can buy the same model of modem that they rent out.
If you want privacy from Google's snooping, use a messenger that requires that Google have closed source system-level services running on your phone and makes extensive use of Google's services for key exchange!
Privacy!
For that matter, the internal culture of the company is such that employees would call it out if the FCC's auditors didn't.
The internal culture that "decided the performance boost from permanently stored messages was worth giving up privacy benefits of transient storage"? The internal culture made up of people who voluntarily chose to work for the largest personal data-mining advertising company in the world? The internal culture of the company that, as you just pointed out, has to be continually audited by the FCC because of previous privacy abuses?
Yeah, I have a hard time putting faith in the integrity and commitment to privacy of the internal culture of fucking Google.
There's a pretty damn easy way to measure fat vs muscle and most people (especially those of the opposite sex) are pretty good at doing so. Even if you're a big lad who still has more visible fat than muscle, any increase in muscle makes a noticeable difference in the way you look and move.
A friend of mine who was pretty big and soft started climbing with me and you could start seeing the difference pretty quicly. Most people can tell the difference between big and soft and big and and strong. You also start feeling better, which helps keep your motivation up. Exercise is only part of a complete weight loss regimen, but it's worth doing on its own, too. It's been the best medicine for my chronic crippling depression.