They weren't annoying becuase they were ads! They were annoying because someone wassticking distracting nonsense in the way of what I was trying to do.
Then maybe when you post something to complain about distracting nonsense, you should avoid focusing so much on ads. And you certainly shouldn't be referring to something as an ad when it is clearly not.
Most Jews or Muslims wouldn't expect you not to ear port, simply that you didn't mix up pork and other meat either while preparing or cooking it (in the same way that most vegetarians don't mind you eating meat as long as you don't fry their carrots in lard, or something).
In the same light, they can handle me drawing a picture of Mohammad. The point here isn't the specific religion and associated specific custom. My point is that respect goes multiple ways and being respectful does not require me to completely adjust my life to accommodate everyone else in the world.
It offends their religious sensibilities. I'll never understand why respecting someone else's religious views (or lack there of) is such a bad thing?
Respect is not carte blanc. If I go to someone's place of worship or home, I'm going to have the decency to respect their religion and customs; wear a hat, take off your shoes, be a part of the group singing the song, etc. But that begins to wane once we're out the door. If they want to come over to my house, I'm going to want that same level of respect. As a good host, it'd be respectful for me to provide hamburgers as well as the pork ribs that I think really makes a good BBQ. And I'm not going to be offended if someone must pass on my killer baby back ribs that's one of my specialties. But we're not going to dump out the rack of ribs because someone's religion prohibits pork and it's ludicrous to listen to any such demands.
What is a system administrator to do? There is no way to prepare for this kind of thing, the attack vectors will be unknowable by the general public. My only thought is to switch as many systems away from Microsoft as fast as possible. This is a total security nightmare.
And how is any of this different today? You think the whole malware-as-a-service industry just popped up out of nowhere? There are already knowledgeable entities out there working to compromise your environment. Some of them may already be Governments. Waiting for input from Microsoft on what's a viable attack vector is coming late to the party.
Actually, if you read through the linked article(s), you'd find out that it's two banks that put out alerts. Digging deeper, the developer put out around 50 apps that Google pulled when notified by one of the banks. What the apps actually did is in question. All the banks knew was that they didn't produce the apps that purportedly accessed their services. And that caused concern.
So if they weren't malicious, why do them? From the article:
"Lots could be going on here," he said. "09Droid may simply have been trying to cash in by offering apps that do nothing but provide a shortcut to the online bank's site, which the user could reach himself in the browser."
Under that scenario, 09Droid was out for a quick buck -- literally -- by charging users 99 cents for applications that, while harmless, only added a shortcut icon to the phone's desktop.
Now anyone with common sense could have looked at my Maryland license plus how I was dressed (shorts/Tshirt), and realized I was a tourist not a smuggler. I don't know what they thought they'd find. There's not much room to hide anyone in a two-seater.
Anyway: Rights don't have meaning unless you use them. INSIST upon compliance; refuse to consent to warrantless searches and remain silent.
Kudos for standing up for your rights. Having said that - you'd be surprised at what smugglers do. I've seen some amazing photographs of various things smugglers have done to modify vehicles to smuggle people and contraband through these checkpoints. Your common sense may not be a good indication of what's going on at those border checkpoints.
The counter-point to this is that these environments seem to be really fueled by inaccurate risk assessments these days. I'm not involved in this environment so I couldn't say what the real situation is. Those photographs may be more common or entirely odd-ball one-off situations.
I remember a time when Americans would be bothered by being detained by any government official for more than 0 minutes. Looks like consent's been well manufactured in you.
Sure - I get annoyed at authority figures inconveniencing me as well. But I don't try to turn them in to conspiracies and over-state the situation if / when it happens.
So what is the left's version of Drill Baby Drill?
I'm not sure the left has a version of "Drill Baby Drill" per se. I've never heard of a alternative energy / evironmentalism / anti-offshore (or whatever would be the counter-point to "drill baby drill") drilling phrase being thrown around.
If you want a leftist meme... I'm sure if you hang out around FOX News or their ilk, it won't take long to figure it out.
No. You don't get to get away with this one. The left may spew slogans, but the right produces mantras.
If you don't believe the Left produces mantras, then you might be too close to the problem. All extremes in the political spectrum use the same basic strategies. These slogans / mantras / memes are one of them.
If you ever want a sanity check for what one side's "mantra" is, find out what their critics parrot back at them when things aren't going well. When you have a saying that one side uses in earnest and another side repeats in scorn, you probably have yourself a political slogan.
I hate to keep bringing this up, but people don't want to fiddle with machines. They want them to work. Most people I know buy PCs because that is what they use at work and school. They get free software and often free support.
Very true. However, people don't understand how these things work. The ability to fiddle with a machine doesn't mean I have to be the one to fiddle. I can still gain from others' fiddling and offering me the fruit of their labor. I don't code the vast majority of software I use. I don't engineer the hardware I use. Sometimes I piece these things together myself. Other times, I find someone has come up with an interesting way of doing so and I've followed their instructions on how to to replicate their configuration.
I feel a little disturbed that I can't change batteries, add memory, or write my own programs like I can on my Mac, but then I don't fix my own car anymore either. The worlds moves on, and one either moves or gets run over. And just look at the unemployment rate in the US to see what happens to those that get run over. Sure you can hold rallies and complain about taxes and blame the immigrants, but you are still run over.
Or if you're like Apple and the world moved on, running you over, you keep working on another way to regain your footing. Even then, as interesting as the iPad is, we're far away from it having turned the tables of computing history. Apple is good at producing products who's time has come (and I do think the iPad as an information presentation device is an idea who's time has come) but they don't always hold on to those markets in the long term.
Cedega is a hacked up fork of Wine which is itself an incomplete and buggy implementation of Windows APIs on linux - why would you have similar expectation of Valve's official ports? Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.
Because Transgaming is making a business out of (essentially) providing Cedega as a way for publishing houses to offer cross-platform tittles. Key words to investigate this might include Cider, EVE, and Electronic Arts. It might also be interesting to search on how Sony's SecuROM works in to all this (Transgaming claimed they would include SecuROM on all Cider tittles).
So how would the enemy attack? Probably by exploiting weaknesses in systems and networks. So those systems and networks must be secured and securing them wont be free.
You missed my point. Infosec in the Government has needed funding for a long time now. Funding it is a good thing. However, I would prefer to see funding go towards programs and activities that are effective rather than powering additional levels of bureaucracy.
Having said that - don't get too wrapped up in your "new" war. When it comes down to it, physical control is still important. Those fighter jets will still have a use. AFter all, we've fought this war before - we just called it "espionage".
The pity to all this is that Government has needed to better fund this area for the last 10+ years. Infosec activities have been historically undermanned. This increased funding would seem like welcomed news. But, of course, it's not that simple.
Infosec in the Fed has become a Frankenstein's Monster over the past years. Cluelessness has spawned regulation. NIST requirements have some solid technical basis. But mixed in to compliance is layer upon layer of bureaucracy that requires considerable funding in it's own right. Compliance requires additional management and auditing which requires additional manpower - none of which actually does the technical work or has to have any understanding of the technical issues. In fact, NIST compliance doesn't particularly require any understanding beyond the workings of the regulations themselves. And even achieving compliance with various NIST requirements can still leave one completely open to known security issues (which isn't entirely bad in itself but can set up a false sense of security).
It is possible that some of this funding will trickle down to the layer that should have been funded all along. But it is much more likely that the lions' share of these funds will go to fueling compliance. And investing on questionable new technologies / products while ignoring fundamental architectural and cultural issues that are the real source of many Government infosec issues.
I've gotten in to the habit of jotting down everything in Tomboy. Even raw dumps of logs when I was configuring something, chunks of code, handy one-liners, serial numbers... anything that might be remotely useful. No concern for formatting. Maybe some keywords or quick notes. Better for it to be rough than non-existent. Auto-linking and search within Tomboy has helped me so often.
I've also used it to jot down sensitive information using PGP to encrypt the block. Obviously, those bits need some explanation as they're not to useful to search without it.
He didn't literally say "The US is safer because of 9/11", but he did make the comments that post-9/11 terrorism is all about scale, and that it's harder to pull off a large scale terrorist act because of the threat of being caught.
Yes... that's the premise of Jennings' article. But is that the same thing as being safer?
First - you have to look at context. Schneier wasn't talking about a factor of safety. He was answering the self-imposed question "Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?" From Schneier's article:
As the details of the Times Square car bomb attempt emerge in the wake of Faisal Shahzad's arrest Monday night, one thing has already been made clear: Terrorism is fairly easy. All you need is a gun or a bomb, and a crowded target. Guns are easy to buy. Bombs are easy to make. Crowded targets -- not only in New York, but all over the country -- are easy to come by. If you're willing to die in the aftermath of your attack, you could launch a pretty effective terrorist attack with a few days of planning, maybe less.
But if it's so easy, why aren't there more terrorist attacks like the failed car bomb in New York's Times Square? Or the terrorist shootings in Mumbai? Or the Moscow subway bombings? After the enormous horror and tragedy of 9/11, why have the past eight years been so safe in the U.S.?
Note that he's saying these attacks are easy (arguably no less difficult than before 9/11 - though that's my conjecture, not his). And, in fact, he even lists attacks that happened after 9/11.
The kicker to Jennings' article is that it imposes a conclusion on someone else's work that was never made. If you go back and look at a lot of Schneier's writing, he often notes that terrorism is not and has never been a major threat. And certainly not the threat that the current crop of fear-mongers make it out to be. To take Scheier's article and conclude that there has been a drastic change in the environment is a step away from claiming that everything done in the name of combating terrorism has been effective. Something else that Scheier is constantly critical of in his writings.
That is a sign of negated competition. The NOAA doesn't do media-friendly presentations of its data, so there's room for companies like Accuweather. But it does do weather satellites, so there isn't room for a weather reporting service to deploy its own satellites.
Not necessarily. It could also indicate that the expense of a weather satellite isn't justified by commercial weather forecasting. After all, even NOAA and NWS get a lot of their data from terrestrial weather stations despite their celestial toolbox. Does AccuWeather really need a satellite to operate? You might find that if Governments weren't launching them, nobody else would.
Incidentally, AccuWeather does more than simply glitz up and re-stamp NOAA / NWS data. Their reports are sometimes different than what you'll see in NOAA feeds. They like to point out that they have their own proprietary algorithms with which they scrub various data sources (NOAA being one of them).
There are certain services that likely won't ever be privatized, particularly national defense, simply due to trust (it'd take an extraordinary reputation for a group of people to trust a business with their defense).
Private security forces continue to make the International scene uncomfortable. They can be very effective. But they raise all manner of issues - accountability being one.
But my view is that the original story confuses a massive government presence with a necessary government presence. Just because government does a lot of things, doesn't mean it is best or even competent at doing those things. I don't appreciate the parody of legitimate concerns about the power and extent of government.
I completely understand and support the concern. I agree that the tradition has served us (fairly) well. And skepticism should be applied whenever a Governmental agency wants to slice out a new fiefdom.
All the examples of this sort of thing (including the NOAA stuff) worked because the government agency did an incomplete job. There were undeveloped niches that businesses could exploit. It's still dumb to attempt to enter first class mail or just provide the same data for a price that the NOAA provides for free.
Haven't you just described business 101? Competition in a market always involves doing something better, different, or cheaper. And so there are companies like AccuWeather who continue to operate both because of and despite NOAA. If the existence of NOAA negated competition, none of these weather reporting services would exist.
Again - fair point on first class mail. You can't compete there simply because there's a law against it (it's been tried). But first class mail is less important these days. And in those more profitable avenues, the USPS' competitors have forced the USPS to adapt and change.
That's because the USPS is poorly run and uncompetitive, even with government funding, in the space that these companies compete in. And because these companies now have significant political protection against government attempting to shut them down.
None the less, these are examples of successful competition against Government agencies. It's not always going to work. Sometimes the economics just won't work out. And as you noted, there ARE laws that establish a monopoly for the USPS which have shut down other historical attempts to directly compete (the focus being first class mail which has slowly been decreasing in importance over the decades). But to dismiss the idea outright as "dumb" is ignoring examples of when competition does work (and consequently dismissing times when Governmental agencies actually do a decent job).
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They weren't annoying becuase they were ads! They were annoying because someone wassticking distracting nonsense in the way of what I was trying to do.
Then maybe when you post something to complain about distracting nonsense, you should avoid focusing so much on ads. And you certainly shouldn't be referring to something as an ad when it is clearly not.
I don't know what it's advertising. I don't know what the punch-the-monkey ads were advertising either!
But the punch-the-monkey ads were, in fact, ads. This is not.
Most Jews or Muslims wouldn't expect you not to ear port, simply that you didn't mix up pork and other meat either while preparing or cooking it (in the same way that most vegetarians don't mind you eating meat as long as you don't fry their carrots in lard, or something).
In the same light, they can handle me drawing a picture of Mohammad. The point here isn't the specific religion and associated specific custom. My point is that respect goes multiple ways and being respectful does not require me to completely adjust my life to accommodate everyone else in the world.
It offends their religious sensibilities. I'll never understand why respecting someone else's religious views (or lack there of) is such a bad thing?
Respect is not carte blanc. If I go to someone's place of worship or home, I'm going to have the decency to respect their religion and customs; wear a hat, take off your shoes, be a part of the group singing the song, etc. But that begins to wane once we're out the door. If they want to come over to my house, I'm going to want that same level of respect. As a good host, it'd be respectful for me to provide hamburgers as well as the pork ribs that I think really makes a good BBQ. And I'm not going to be offended if someone must pass on my killer baby back ribs that's one of my specialties. But we're not going to dump out the rack of ribs because someone's religion prohibits pork and it's ludicrous to listen to any such demands.
Didn't you hear? Fucking is passe now that we have iPads and freedom from porn.
What is a system administrator to do? There is no way to prepare for this kind of thing, the attack vectors will be unknowable by the general public. My only thought is to switch as many systems away from Microsoft as fast as possible. This is a total security nightmare.
And how is any of this different today? You think the whole malware-as-a-service industry just popped up out of nowhere? There are already knowledgeable entities out there working to compromise your environment. Some of them may already be Governments. Waiting for input from Microsoft on what's a viable attack vector is coming late to the party.
Is this so the government can more easily infiltrate vulnerable systems or so it can protect itself if it's using MS products?
They're just replicating what's already going on in the private sector - from industry to counter-culture.
Doesn't Linux already do this, for everyone? The only people who are going to be fooled by this in the government are elitist pricks.
Oh. Directors. Well, of course - they're the ones who directly control the budget(s). Of course you want to get them on board.
Actually, if you read through the linked article(s), you'd find out that it's two banks that put out alerts. Digging deeper, the developer put out around 50 apps that Google pulled when notified by one of the banks. What the apps actually did is in question. All the banks knew was that they didn't produce the apps that purportedly accessed their services. And that caused concern.
So if they weren't malicious, why do them? From the article:
"Lots could be going on here," he said. "09Droid may simply have been trying to cash in by offering apps that do nothing but provide a shortcut to the online bank's site, which the user could reach himself in the browser."
Under that scenario, 09Droid was out for a quick buck -- literally -- by charging users 99 cents for applications that, while harmless, only added a shortcut icon to the phone's desktop.
Now anyone with common sense could have looked at my Maryland license plus how I was dressed (shorts/Tshirt), and realized I was a tourist not a smuggler. I don't know what they thought they'd find. There's not much room to hide anyone in a two-seater.
Anyway: Rights don't have meaning unless you use them. INSIST upon compliance; refuse to consent to warrantless searches and remain silent.
Kudos for standing up for your rights. Having said that - you'd be surprised at what smugglers do. I've seen some amazing photographs of various things smugglers have done to modify vehicles to smuggle people and contraband through these checkpoints. Your common sense may not be a good indication of what's going on at those border checkpoints.
The counter-point to this is that these environments seem to be really fueled by inaccurate risk assessments these days. I'm not involved in this environment so I couldn't say what the real situation is. Those photographs may be more common or entirely odd-ball one-off situations.
I remember a time when Americans would be bothered by being detained by any government official for more than 0 minutes. Looks like consent's been well manufactured in you.
Sure - I get annoyed at authority figures inconveniencing me as well. But I don't try to turn them in to conspiracies and over-state the situation if / when it happens.
So what is the left's version of Drill Baby Drill?
I'm not sure the left has a version of "Drill Baby Drill" per se. I've never heard of a alternative energy / evironmentalism / anti-offshore (or whatever would be the counter-point to "drill baby drill") drilling phrase being thrown around.
If you want a leftist meme... I'm sure if you hang out around FOX News or their ilk, it won't take long to figure it out.
There is no "extreme left" in the United States. Liberal in the US is the equivalent of centrist to slightly conservative in Europe.
And I bet Europe's even-more-left-than-the-USofA has some nice slogans and mantras of their own.
No. You don't get to get away with this one. The left may spew slogans, but the right produces mantras.
If you don't believe the Left produces mantras, then you might be too close to the problem. All extremes in the political spectrum use the same basic strategies. These slogans / mantras / memes are one of them.
If you ever want a sanity check for what one side's "mantra" is, find out what their critics parrot back at them when things aren't going well. When you have a saying that one side uses in earnest and another side repeats in scorn, you probably have yourself a political slogan.
I hate to keep bringing this up, but people don't want to fiddle with machines. They want them to work. Most people I know buy PCs because that is what they use at work and school. They get free software and often free support.
Very true. However, people don't understand how these things work. The ability to fiddle with a machine doesn't mean I have to be the one to fiddle. I can still gain from others' fiddling and offering me the fruit of their labor. I don't code the vast majority of software I use. I don't engineer the hardware I use. Sometimes I piece these things together myself. Other times, I find someone has come up with an interesting way of doing so and I've followed their instructions on how to to replicate their configuration.
I feel a little disturbed that I can't change batteries, add memory, or write my own programs like I can on my Mac, but then I don't fix my own car anymore either. The worlds moves on, and one either moves or gets run over. And just look at the unemployment rate in the US to see what happens to those that get run over. Sure you can hold rallies and complain about taxes and blame the immigrants, but you are still run over.
Or if you're like Apple and the world moved on, running you over, you keep working on another way to regain your footing. Even then, as interesting as the iPad is, we're far away from it having turned the tables of computing history. Apple is good at producing products who's time has come (and I do think the iPad as an information presentation device is an idea who's time has come) but they don't always hold on to those markets in the long term.
So you're saying you liked XKCD before it got popular, but now that it's popular it sucks? Lemme guess... you like indie bands, too?
I hate all indie bands. Just in case.
Cedega is a hacked up fork of Wine which is itself an incomplete and buggy implementation of Windows APIs on linux - why would you have similar expectation of Valve's official ports? Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.
Because Transgaming is making a business out of (essentially) providing Cedega as a way for publishing houses to offer cross-platform tittles. Key words to investigate this might include Cider, EVE, and Electronic Arts. It might also be interesting to search on how Sony's SecuROM works in to all this (Transgaming claimed they would include SecuROM on all Cider tittles).
So how would the enemy attack? Probably by exploiting weaknesses in systems and networks. So those systems and networks must be secured and securing them wont be free.
You missed my point. Infosec in the Government has needed funding for a long time now. Funding it is a good thing. However, I would prefer to see funding go towards programs and activities that are effective rather than powering additional levels of bureaucracy.
Having said that - don't get too wrapped up in your "new" war. When it comes down to it, physical control is still important. Those fighter jets will still have a use. AFter all, we've fought this war before - we just called it "espionage".
The pity to all this is that Government has needed to better fund this area for the last 10+ years. Infosec activities have been historically undermanned. This increased funding would seem like welcomed news. But, of course, it's not that simple.
Infosec in the Fed has become a Frankenstein's Monster over the past years. Cluelessness has spawned regulation. NIST requirements have some solid technical basis. But mixed in to compliance is layer upon layer of bureaucracy that requires considerable funding in it's own right. Compliance requires additional management and auditing which requires additional manpower - none of which actually does the technical work or has to have any understanding of the technical issues. In fact, NIST compliance doesn't particularly require any understanding beyond the workings of the regulations themselves. And even achieving compliance with various NIST requirements can still leave one completely open to known security issues (which isn't entirely bad in itself but can set up a false sense of security).
It is possible that some of this funding will trickle down to the layer that should have been funded all along. But it is much more likely that the lions' share of these funds will go to fueling compliance. And investing on questionable new technologies / products while ignoring fundamental architectural and cultural issues that are the real source of many Government infosec issues.
I've gotten in to the habit of jotting down everything in Tomboy. Even raw dumps of logs when I was configuring something, chunks of code, handy one-liners, serial numbers... anything that might be remotely useful. No concern for formatting. Maybe some keywords or quick notes. Better for it to be rough than non-existent. Auto-linking and search within Tomboy has helped me so often.
I've also used it to jot down sensitive information using PGP to encrypt the block. Obviously, those bits need some explanation as they're not to useful to search without it.
He didn't literally say "The US is safer because of 9/11", but he did make the comments that post-9/11 terrorism is all about scale, and that it's harder to pull off a large scale terrorist act because of the threat of being caught.
Yes... that's the premise of Jennings' article. But is that the same thing as being safer?
First - you have to look at context. Schneier wasn't talking about a factor of safety. He was answering the self-imposed question "Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?" From Schneier's article:
Note that he's saying these attacks are easy (arguably no less difficult than before 9/11 - though that's my conjecture, not his). And, in fact, he even lists attacks that happened after 9/11.
The kicker to Jennings' article is that it imposes a conclusion on someone else's work that was never made. If you go back and look at a lot of Schneier's writing, he often notes that terrorism is not and has never been a major threat. And certainly not the threat that the current crop of fear-mongers make it out to be. To take Scheier's article and conclude that there has been a drastic change in the environment is a step away from claiming that everything done in the name of combating terrorism has been effective. Something else that Scheier is constantly critical of in his writings.
there is also no reason to defend your copyright against someone who is encouraging others to buy and use your copyrighted product.
You just jumped from trademark to copyright; two sometimes related but entirely different things.
That is a sign of negated competition. The NOAA doesn't do media-friendly presentations of its data, so there's room for companies like Accuweather. But it does do weather satellites, so there isn't room for a weather reporting service to deploy its own satellites.
Not necessarily. It could also indicate that the expense of a weather satellite isn't justified by commercial weather forecasting. After all, even NOAA and NWS get a lot of their data from terrestrial weather stations despite their celestial toolbox. Does AccuWeather really need a satellite to operate? You might find that if Governments weren't launching them, nobody else would.
Incidentally, AccuWeather does more than simply glitz up and re-stamp NOAA / NWS data. Their reports are sometimes different than what you'll see in NOAA feeds. They like to point out that they have their own proprietary algorithms with which they scrub various data sources (NOAA being one of them).
There are certain services that likely won't ever be privatized, particularly national defense, simply due to trust (it'd take an extraordinary reputation for a group of people to trust a business with their defense).
Private security forces continue to make the International scene uncomfortable. They can be very effective. But they raise all manner of issues - accountability being one.
But my view is that the original story confuses a massive government presence with a necessary government presence. Just because government does a lot of things, doesn't mean it is best or even competent at doing those things. I don't appreciate the parody of legitimate concerns about the power and extent of government.
I completely understand and support the concern. I agree that the tradition has served us (fairly) well. And skepticism should be applied whenever a Governmental agency wants to slice out a new fiefdom.
All the examples of this sort of thing (including the NOAA stuff) worked because the government agency did an incomplete job. There were undeveloped niches that businesses could exploit. It's still dumb to attempt to enter first class mail or just provide the same data for a price that the NOAA provides for free.
Haven't you just described business 101? Competition in a market always involves doing something better, different, or cheaper. And so there are companies like AccuWeather who continue to operate both because of and despite NOAA. If the existence of NOAA negated competition, none of these weather reporting services would exist.
Again - fair point on first class mail. You can't compete there simply because there's a law against it (it's been tried). But first class mail is less important these days. And in those more profitable avenues, the USPS' competitors have forced the USPS to adapt and change.
That's because the USPS is poorly run and uncompetitive, even with government funding, in the space that these companies compete in. And because these companies now have significant political protection against government attempting to shut them down.
None the less, these are examples of successful competition against Government agencies. It's not always going to work. Sometimes the economics just won't work out. And as you noted, there ARE laws that establish a monopoly for the USPS which have shut down other historical attempts to directly compete (the focus being first class mail which has slowly been decreasing in importance over the decades). But to dismiss the idea outright as "dumb" is ignoring examples of when competition does work (and consequently dismissing times when Governmental agencies actually do a decent job).