You're smoking crack if you think Tim is doing anything illegal - the tax code is written so that big donor corporations can find favorable tax treatment strategies.
But the idea that somehow if the USG takes money from Apple that there will be more social good is laughable on its face. You want to talk about medicine? I won't give Apple credit for the idea of the smartphone revolution (the authors of "The Innovators' Solution" get credit for the free-market conceptual framework) but Jobs did execute the vision competently and create the market. That market has done more to provide access to medical care (to look at just one niche) for low-income people than the entirety of the ACA and its billions of dollars have done. Apple 's money helps brown get cabs - DC money goes to drone-strikes on brown people. There's no moral case for a forceable taking from Apple.
Tim's claim that the tax-questions are 'political crap' is a tautological NOOP though - of course taxes are political - that's the definition. Politics is the mechanism by which humans allow emotions to govern their society at the expense of reason and evidence.
If Tim deserves criticism on this it's because he's sitting on a huge pile of money that could be making much greater contributions to society through enhanced R&D and solving social problems with technology than is already being done. Good on him for fighting back on Orwellian surveillance but there are 99 other problems that deserve the same level of attention. Apple seems incapable of getting those done (I had high hopes five years ago) - I think they're often hamstrung by the same zero-sum thinking that defines DC and just manage to do somewhat better because their staff is a few notches smarter.
> There isn't a single white-hat penetration tester out there who will say its ok to access systems you aren't given permission to access, even if its in the act of discovering vulnerabilities that you intend to disclose.
If you're not hired by FB but are probing their systems to look for vulnerabilities as their bounty system encourages, you cannot meet the criterion you outline.
The goal apparently needs to be more clear: if FB's goal is to find as many problems as possible then stopping at the first problem and closing that door does not achieve the goal.
Unless we hear that he sold the info to a third party, it looks like there's no victim here and FB looks bad for overreacting when it got caught with its pants down (wait... Instagram, not Snapchat).
This shouldn't be surprising - the job of governments throughout history has been to privatize gains and socialize losses. That's why governments grant corporations in the first place, by definition. If people would look at historical outcomes instead of the platitudes espoused by seventh-grade government schoolteachers we could start making some real progress towards a civil society.
Oh, but hey, we have microwave ovens and jet airplanes, so we're somehow smarter than the other humans in history so THIS TIME it'll be different.
Finally a reason to buy a smartwatch? Except then the battery is dead all day...
SleepAsDroid has been algorithmically determining users' waking state for years using phone accelerometers. The socks are cute, but adding this feature to the existing apps would be (obviously) far more popular. And maybe save Netflix a few petabytes of transfer a month.
> That said, I'm feeling some nice warm fuzzy schadenfreude about this, after what he did with Daraprim.
And that's the trap set for you. The system that allows any asshole like this to do the same thing tomorrow is still firmly in place.
Wake me up when patients can import drugs from abroad, without any hassle, to keep miscreants like Shkreli in check with competition. I'll wear my comfy PJ's as it'll be a while, as corporations continue to gouge patients, leaving the working poor without access to medicine while a few get rich.
>How long will it be before the NSA exports all it's 'interesting' databases to GCHQ, and vice versa.
"How long"? This was the purpose of ECHELON which we spoke about here at length in the 90's. Back then we thought they were merely skirting the law - today we know that they were ready to flip the "full-on illegal" switch after 9/11.
The NSA is even on public record at this point about paying the Israelis to spy on Americans, and that's beyond Five Eyes.
If even Slashdotters don't know the surveillance status quo, is there really any hope that the public writ large has any idea what's going on?
Now with GRUB not really being password protected, an attacker can easily get to a privileged shell without a password
true, but your root partition is encrypted with a good LUKS passphrase so all they can do is see your disks, similar to a USB boot. If you already password-protected your BIOS, have a physical lock on the battery, and epoxied all your ports shut, then, yes, this is a higher level of concern. Probably most people don't fall into that scenario, though (and if they do, trusted boot is a better solution).
Clearly the bug is a problem, but the impact will be minimal.
Your hypothetical is nonsense but just to be safe we should install microphones in everybody's homes and record from them all the time. For safety. 'Terrists.
But it is not making fun of the whole crap, it's acting as if it should be that religions are allowed to perform a service that makes two people enter a binding contract. In this reality, not some afterlife.
Yeah, now with Government Almighty replacing God Almighty to dictate the terms' of the married life. To substitute one fictional authority for another is no great victory. CFSM won't condemn people to Hell for getting a divorce but they'll arrange it such that some of those people might wonder if it would have been a more prudent choice.
On the other hand, if their goal is to so royally piss off the traditional religions by getting the government to recognize Pasta Medlies that *those* groups take all their marriages private again, then perhaps it's a wise long-term strategy.
Amen, +5. I know several devs who are women and a higher percentage of them won't put up with management bullshit than the male devs I know (many of whom are human floormats). The very best thing male devs can do for the culture is to aspire to be as socially courageous and self-respecting as the women. One reason female devs are disrespected is because male devs create an environment for all devs to be disrespected.
Of course, when my plans for groups include "be more courageous" usually I'm disappointed in the outcomes.
I don't understand why people believe a single word from the (US) government
It's part of their religion.
Every time, on nearly every topic but especially security / military, what they say turns out to be not true.
Talking snakes poll even better - objective truth has little relevance.
But also consider the mental load of admitting that they're being economically and culturally ruined by these people. That would imply a moral imperative to action, which would require them to get off the couch. Technology has created the best living conditions in human history which brings comfort. They don't realize that fascistic regulations prevent that technology & comfort from being many times better. That's where the flying cars are.
Approval Voting is the method that's almost always Condorcet-complete yet most people can still understand. It's nearly impossible to imagine how those in power because of FPP would ever allow more fair methods to come into place.
Which is really just a clue that fancied-up mob-rule systems like "democracy" ought to be abandoned for more morally-acceptable alternatives.
If these kinds of things bother you, the next neighbor will just as much as the current one.
I can't stand that kind of living (grew up that way). The other morning my big noise complaint was a moose bugling from across my field, but that's pretty rare. Once in a while a helicopter goes over or a logging truck rolls by, but compared with barking dogs and hourly sirens, there's no contest.
Right - Jeez, give gravity a break. It has to work over the distance of the entire universe and resist the cosmological 'constant' in its field. This isn't just a lazy ex-husband deserving of your criticism.
Mike, I appreciate your work on CISPA/PIPA and related tragedies - thank you.
At this point, is there any real benefit to resist them aside from social signalling? It seems that with the massive centralization of power and the near-complete abandonment of representative government in the US (and elsewhere abroad similarly afflicted), we're left with a situation where every one of these draconian bills will be coming up again and again, funded by the rent-seekers and their corrupt political allies until the grass-roots runs out of steam and finally it's attached to a bill that funds the program that removes lead from baby formula, and sails through on a voice vote on the Friday before Labor Day. It doesn't even matter at this point if the full text of a plan to kill all the puppies and kittens makes it up to Wikileaks - once they want something, it's a fait accompli and then "we" spend the next 25+ years mopping up the mess.
Why should we continue to street-fight on their turf instead of investing our scarce resources in building mutual-defense alliances against these predatory regulat[ors,ions]?
a delay that allowed me to watch the launch would be awesome.
And the launch is the more boring part! With more notice (and not the week before Christmas!), I would have hopped in the car and motored the boy down to Fla. to see history in the making. Musk is messing with the fanbois - expect a scrub or two.;)
> Is it penny pinching or just sell it and get it out of here
OR, not XOR, of course, so yes. Secure & fast is expensive. Secure and slow can be cheaper. Insecure and cheap tends to be fast.
But the root cause is that the manufacturers have little downside to doing this. Each wronged individual has no financial incentive to seek restitution due to the legal fees involved, and class actions are a load of horseshit. Iceland used marketable torts for about four hundred years (the wronged gets a small payment from an aggregator that then sues collectively). Then they got a Church and a King and things went downhill from there.
So, yeah, just rearchitect the legal system to get your IoT secure... but misaligned incentives will never produce the desired outcomes.
> but being bled year after year by an incumbent monopolist is worse
Only for the consumers. It's great for the rent-seekers and rent-grantors. But Google has little choice but to ask the rent-grantors. They're not stupid either - they're going to create a scene. Either they expand or they prove a point for their legislative efforts. Win-win. Google is doing social good here.
Maybe they're wisely cutting their losses, but they're also re-enforcing their poor industry reputation. Here's my previous comment about FirefoxOS:
Commitment? (Score:5, Insightful) by bill_mcgonigle (4333) * on 2012.07.02 12:19 (#40518547) Homepage Journal I didn't learn from TFAs what Mozilla's commitment is to this. It seems like a good idea, but Mozilla has such a long history of abandoning [lawrencemandel.com] really good ideas [mozilla.org] when they turn out not to be easy.
Don't get me wrong - I use Firefox on the desktop, but MoFo was such a grand vision, once upon a time. As MoFo just becomes "the Firefox group" such opportunity is lost. And to think - Fire[bird,fox] was the revolt app against former management that once again seems familiar. Eh... maybe there's still an ember of a skunkworks left there - one can hope.
Slashdot Mirror
You're smoking crack if you think Tim is doing anything illegal - the tax code is written so that big donor corporations can find favorable tax treatment strategies.
But the idea that somehow if the USG takes money from Apple that there will be more social good is laughable on its face. You want to talk about medicine? I won't give Apple credit for the idea of the smartphone revolution (the authors of "The Innovators' Solution" get credit for the free-market conceptual framework) but Jobs did execute the vision competently and create the market. That market has done more to provide access to medical care (to look at just one niche) for low-income people than the entirety of the ACA and its billions of dollars have done. Apple 's money helps brown get cabs - DC money goes to drone-strikes on brown people. There's no moral case for a forceable taking from Apple.
Tim's claim that the tax-questions are 'political crap' is a tautological NOOP though - of course taxes are political - that's the definition. Politics is the mechanism by which humans allow emotions to govern their society at the expense of reason and evidence.
If Tim deserves criticism on this it's because he's sitting on a huge pile of money that could be making much greater contributions to society through enhanced R&D and solving social problems with technology than is already being done. Good on him for fighting back on Orwellian surveillance but there are 99 other problems that deserve the same level of attention. Apple seems incapable of getting those done (I had high hopes five years ago) - I think they're often hamstrung by the same zero-sum thinking that defines DC and just manage to do somewhat better because their staff is a few notches smarter.
> There isn't a single white-hat penetration tester out there who will say its ok to access systems you aren't given permission to access, even if its in the act of discovering vulnerabilities that you intend to disclose.
If you're not hired by FB but are probing their systems to look for vulnerabilities as their bounty system encourages, you cannot meet the criterion you outline.
The goal apparently needs to be more clear: if FB's goal is to find as many problems as possible then stopping at the first problem and closing that door does not achieve the goal.
Unless we hear that he sold the info to a third party, it looks like there's no victim here and FB looks bad for overreacting when it got caught with its pants down (wait ... Instagram, not Snapchat).
Why be concerned about illegal searches when illegal wars are just hand-waived away?
Prinicples are a bitch, I know, but rigorously reasoned arguments will require their use.
This shouldn't be surprising - the job of governments throughout history has been to privatize gains and socialize losses. That's why governments grant corporations in the first place, by definition. If people would look at historical outcomes instead of the platitudes espoused by seventh-grade government schoolteachers we could start making some real progress towards a civil society.
Oh, but hey, we have microwave ovens and jet airplanes, so we're somehow smarter than the other humans in history so THIS TIME it'll be different.
Finally a reason to buy a smartwatch? Except then the battery is dead all day...
SleepAsDroid has been algorithmically determining users' waking state for years using phone accelerometers. The socks are cute, but adding this feature to the existing apps would be (obviously) far more popular. And maybe save Netflix a few petabytes of transfer a month.
> That said, I'm feeling some nice warm fuzzy schadenfreude about this, after what he did with Daraprim.
And that's the trap set for you. The system that allows any asshole like this to do the same thing tomorrow is still firmly in place.
Wake me up when patients can import drugs from abroad, without any hassle, to keep miscreants like Shkreli in check with competition. I'll wear my comfy PJ's as it'll be a while, as corporations continue to gouge patients, leaving the working poor without access to medicine while a few get rich.
>How long will it be before the NSA exports all it's 'interesting' databases to GCHQ, and vice versa.
"How long"? This was the purpose of ECHELON which we spoke about here at length in the 90's. Back then we thought they were merely skirting the law - today we know that they were ready to flip the "full-on illegal" switch after 9/11.
The NSA is even on public record at this point about paying the Israelis to spy on Americans, and that's beyond Five Eyes.
If even Slashdotters don't know the surveillance status quo, is there really any hope that the public writ large has any idea what's going on?
Impressive that 35,000 users forgot how to NAT and firewall. "Oops!"
Now with GRUB not really being password protected, an attacker can easily get to a privileged shell without a password
true, but your root partition is encrypted with a good LUKS passphrase so all they can do is see your disks, similar to a USB boot. If you already password-protected your BIOS, have a physical lock on the battery, and epoxied all your ports shut, then, yes, this is a higher level of concern. Probably most people don't fall into that scenario, though (and if they do, trusted boot is a better solution).
Clearly the bug is a problem, but the impact will be minimal.
Your hypothetical is nonsense but just to be safe we should install microphones in everybody's homes and record from them all the time. For safety. 'Terrists.
"Alexa, what is a police state?"
But it is not making fun of the whole crap, it's acting as if it should be that religions are allowed to perform a service that makes two people enter a binding contract. In this reality, not some afterlife.
Yeah, now with Government Almighty replacing God Almighty to dictate the terms' of the married life. To substitute one fictional authority for another is no great victory. CFSM won't condemn people to Hell for getting a divorce but they'll arrange it such that some of those people might wonder if it would have been a more prudent choice.
On the other hand, if their goal is to so royally piss off the traditional religions by getting the government to recognize Pasta Medlies that *those* groups take all their marriages private again, then perhaps it's a wise long-term strategy.
The Tor Project is a tax-deductable 501(c)(3) for US taxpayers. They have several ways to donate.
Amen, +5. I know several devs who are women and a higher percentage of them won't put up with management bullshit than the male devs I know (many of whom are human floormats). The very best thing male devs can do for the culture is to aspire to be as socially courageous and self-respecting as the women. One reason female devs are disrespected is because male devs create an environment for all devs to be disrespected.
Of course, when my plans for groups include "be more courageous" usually I'm disappointed in the outcomes.
> having the occasional female-specific event to try and correct some of the imbalance does not count as discrimination.
You can't undefine the word. You can make a [good - ed.] argument that it's not an injustice, but denying the facts does nobody any favors.
I don't understand why people believe a single word from the (US) government
It's part of their religion.
Every time, on nearly every topic but especially security / military, what they say turns out to be not true.
Talking snakes poll even better - objective truth has little relevance.
But also consider the mental load of admitting that they're being economically and culturally ruined by these people. That would imply a moral imperative to action, which would require them to get off the couch. Technology has created the best living conditions in human history which brings comfort. They don't realize that fascistic regulations prevent that technology & comfort from being many times better. That's where the flying cars are.
Approval Voting is the method that's almost always Condorcet-complete yet most people can still understand. It's nearly impossible to imagine how those in power because of FPP would ever allow more fair methods to come into place.
Which is really just a clue that fancied-up mob-rule systems like "democracy" ought to be abandoned for more morally-acceptable alternatives.
If these kinds of things bother you, the next neighbor will just as much as the current one.
I can't stand that kind of living (grew up that way). The other morning my big noise complaint was a moose bugling from across my field, but that's pretty rare. Once in a while a helicopter goes over or a logging truck rolls by, but compared with barking dogs and hourly sirens, there's no contest.
First be happy, then get rich.
Did you get through TFS? The claim is that overall errors have been reduced but not eliminated.
He could be lying, but if that's the counterclaim, then show some evidence for it.
Right - Jeez, give gravity a break. It has to work over the distance of the entire universe and resist the cosmological 'constant' in its field. This isn't just a lazy ex-husband deserving of your criticism.
Mike, I appreciate your work on CISPA/PIPA and related tragedies - thank you.
At this point, is there any real benefit to resist them aside from social signalling? It seems that with the massive centralization of power and the near-complete abandonment of representative government in the US (and elsewhere abroad similarly afflicted), we're left with a situation where every one of these draconian bills will be coming up again and again, funded by the rent-seekers and their corrupt political allies until the grass-roots runs out of steam and finally it's attached to a bill that funds the program that removes lead from baby formula, and sails through on a voice vote on the Friday before Labor Day. It doesn't even matter at this point if the full text of a plan to kill all the puppies and kittens makes it up to Wikileaks - once they want something, it's a fait accompli and then "we" spend the next 25+ years mopping up the mess.
Why should we continue to street-fight on their turf instead of investing our scarce resources in building mutual-defense alliances against these predatory regulat[ors,ions]?
a delay that allowed me to watch the launch would be awesome.
And the launch is the more boring part! With more notice (and not the week before Christmas!), I would have hopped in the car and motored the boy down to Fla. to see history in the making. Musk is messing with the fanbois - expect a scrub or two. ;)
> Is it penny pinching or just sell it and get it out of here
OR, not XOR, of course, so yes. Secure & fast is expensive. Secure and slow can be cheaper. Insecure and cheap tends to be fast.
But the root cause is that the manufacturers have little downside to doing this. Each wronged individual has no financial incentive to seek restitution due to the legal fees involved, and class actions are a load of horseshit. Iceland used marketable torts for about four hundred years (the wronged gets a small payment from an aggregator that then sues collectively). Then they got a Church and a King and things went downhill from there.
So, yeah, just rearchitect the legal system to get your IoT secure ... but misaligned incentives will never produce the desired outcomes.
> but being bled year after year by an incumbent monopolist is worse
Only for the consumers. It's great for the rent-seekers and rent-grantors. But Google has little choice but to ask the rent-grantors. They're not stupid either - they're going to create a scene. Either they expand or they prove a point for their legislative efforts. Win-win. Google is doing social good here.
Most US places have a fascistic utility regime. Perhaps you're not from around here.
Maybe they're wisely cutting their losses, but they're also re-enforcing their poor industry reputation. Here's my previous comment about FirefoxOS:
Don't get me wrong - I use Firefox on the desktop, but MoFo was such a grand vision, once upon a time. As MoFo just becomes "the Firefox group" such opportunity is lost. And to think - Fire[bird,fox] was the revolt app against former management that once again seems familiar. Eh ... maybe there's still an ember of a skunkworks left there - one can hope.