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User: joboss

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  1. When I was hacking those I would put horrific porn on them, max out the volume and crash the control services.

    The CIA is being given too much credit here. Take it from a security expert. There's very little here that's surprising or concerning. Much of it isn't truly owned by the CIA in any meaningful way and is more just how the world works.

    The only real concern from this that wasn't pre-existing but again predictable is that details on their hacking program came out.

  2. No value for money on Apple Losing Out To Microsoft and Google in US Classrooms (macrumors.com) · · Score: 1

    Of course it is losing out. No competent IT manager for any facility would go apply because of the very high costs. It's a fashion accessory like Rolex, etc. There are some advantages with Apple in somethings but overall at scale it's an absolutely awful brand for consumers. Some of its advantages come from the smaller userbase.

    Even if Apply subsidises in education the people coming out of it need to splash out hugely on Apple and simply wont about it. It's not universally accessible by a long shot and will not represent real world usage. Schools also wont operate in a bubble. The use of Apple can impact surrounding elements.

  3. Re:If you can't mandate English in England.. on Uber Loses Legal Test Case Over Language (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    I think drivers should have some minimal reading skill and speaking skill. Basic though. You need to read signs, communicate with customers, etc. The company should consider offering some language training in cases.

  4. Sorry.

  5. Re:Thing about spam on Is Google's Comment Filtering Tool 'Vanishing' Legitimate Comments? (vortex.com) · · Score: 1

    I find that Google is quite good at separating the wheat from the chaff at least for my use case. However I find there are some good practices to avoid receiving large amounts of spam.

    Your signature is contradictory. Spam filters are a necessary evil. To change conditions such that the necessity no longer exists would take tyrannical action.

    There's definitely a lot of debate about how spam filters should be implemented and all of the various other ways to mitigate it out there.

    Problem solving. It's the only thing people ever value. However problem avoidance, management and mitigation as also serious disciplines. Actually understanding problems is the most serious discipline of all. You can call it problem analysis. A lot of problems the solution comes from the problem itself if you study it carefully. Spam though isn't entirely so simple.

  6. Reddit has a spam filter that silently removes comments and its operation is completely mysterious. It can be tied in with if users report comments as spam. If you report a comment you don't like as spam rather than some other rule and mods enforce the rules according to personal believe and political ideology then it can sway the spam filters towards that in theory. Types of abuse can also be reported as spam even though it's not spam in the normal commercial sense.

    With business emails and things you can't get away with too many false positives but for forums it can be pretty bad, you can get away with a lot. The worst part of it I find is the lack of transparency. You have to manually check that your comment is really visible in a round about way.

    I think this is something that can be a growing problem in the future with a lot of these things. I've personally found that Google has changed a lot over time now really favouring newest content. It's really hard to get specific things anymore when you search especially on current affairs. Their's a massive self reinforcing bias towards popular things.

  7. Re:My experiences in other companies and opinions. on Inside Uber's Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    All of this is correct but overlooks when shouty isn't necessarily a bad thing. The world try as hard as you like is not perfect. There are going to sometimes be problems and issues worth getting into a shouting match about. It might be a serious issue like how to avoid laying off staff, keeping the business afloat, etc. You really don't know. You can try to imagine us being Vulcan's but we're not. You know it's also only when people get angry sometimes and disinhibited that something might shake loose.

    There's a few different types of shouty. Obviously how dare I not get my own way or irritable over other things in their life types are a problem. Sometimes it can arise from frustration in a situation because something is lost in translation or some other kind of issue of mutual comprehension. This happens a lot. I get shouty a lot when it comes to hard problems with no perfect solution. Dilemmas. Sometimes it is such that the decision might as well be the flip of the coin.

  8. Re:My experiences in other companies and opinions. on Inside Uber's Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    I personally find this whole wordcrime stuff a disturbing side of out society. Whether an anti-homosexual slur is bad or not is subjective and I will be loath to support the people who want to make a huge thing out of something based on superstition or because they can. It's deeply disturbing that our society is so childish and the solution often seems to be more childishness. There's an amusing snag. Millions of people, even homosexual people use anti-homosexual slurs. For me it's part of my language and while it might be within other people's belief system that to use some words is the worst thing they shouldn't have the authority to impose it on others.

    Same as when on a social I drink around some of the Muslims I work with, they aren't petty and don't make a fuss about it. They'll happily sell me bacon at their store. I don't make a fuss about their rituals or impose my own personal standards on them either when there's no real problem or need. This whole word crime thing is a social construct.

    It's still a concern in terms of setting an example but being insensitive shouldn't necessarily be a crime especially when the fault tends to really lie in others being over sensitive. Ultimately people are responsible for their own internal states and if they get upset too easily... You might say well technically in some way these words are homophobic based on some research, guilt by association and desire to project some kind of control but in reality it's an invented problem, there's nothing strictly wrong with the usage in and of itself. Half the people are only really worried that someone else's usage will somehow get them into trouble as a collective. It's a fault (one of many to this effect) in human social instinct and ironically a form of phobia that allows these little taboos to propagate so easily.

    I say bugger a lot or call someone a sod quite often which were also anti-homosexual slurs. I can't imagine that all the horrors and bad things that have ever happened are due to merely that somehow these evil magical words came into the dictionary. I find it religious discrimination because I don't believe in magic. Problems come from underlying beliefs or attitudes in society. When it comes to words such as sod and bugger among many others they lost their magic so to speak as society changed and people become more reasonable. Alternatively from the fact that humans are flawed and some given anything will mess up although you have things like that someone is more likely to mess up with a fork than a spoon but even saying that there are a whole range of words out there that are entirely legitimate that people abuse far more than any of the forbidden words.

    The usage would be the biggest genuine problem if as I said it was actually an attack on the individual on account of being gay. For me that's instantly intolerable. There's nothing to indicate that here and you have to be careful with the standards you impose on others especially if you aren't subject to them.

    We're on the same page that if the manager did that all the time then it would be an issue but once and in a tense situation? I don't find it disturbing at all. There is indeed a risk that someone really homosexual might get caught in the cross hairs or that someone might overhear it and think that employee is genuinely gay. The problem with insults though is that they aren't meant to be literal. If you call someone a dick doesn't mean that they literally are or that you're against dicks. I know people who love dick, practically worship it but still call people a dick in heated debates. If it makes a whole lot of trouble work in a country with good courts or hire real lawyers and not genuinely be guilty.

    The main reason it can make a whole load of trouble is that there are forces that even if wrong you have to abide to. If all the customers want something daft you can't do much about it. Lots of problems like that in society. As I said one way to do it is to joke about the risk in a mocking way to make t

  9. My experiences in other companies and opinions... on Inside Uber's Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Comparing my experiences to those people describe in Uber I would say that Uber slipped on discipline to an extent. The muddies are watered however because a lot of people have unreasonably high standards which can be for a number of reasons. However in any companies or large group of people you have incidents like this. It makes it hard to really measure the problem and if it's really that big. I would say however the reported response to serious incidents looks insufficient to me.

    > workers are sometimes pitted against one another and where

    I've seen this in some places where I work. Give two people the same task and see who finishes first. I've also seen this happen where multiple companies working together on projects are all given the same task by a client (either abusively or out of lack of coordination) who thinks its clever but the end result is loads of pointless work and a massive tangle of stepping on toes. It can become extremely demoralising and sabotages everyone. It's artificial competition and doesn't reap the benefits people think it might. I have seen companies destroyed by their client like that. You need to have division of responsibilities and not a free for all like feeding pidgeons. The problem manifests in a lot of ways. I hate when I have a list of ten tasks on my list, I am working on the first one and others try to steal one or might of the pending nine even though they either have other things to do or aren't suited to do those tasks properly.

    I've also seen hire to try where two candidates will be hired, given tasks and then the one that appears to hit the deck running (more likely crawls a bit faster) will be kept and the other fired a few weeks later usually because of rush hiring and a desperation to fill a seat rather than fill a position with someone actually qualified for the job. You then get stuck with such people that can really not always work out well. Something like one in five or one in ten might work out as productive and talented but by their the seat is filled and after a certain period of employment laws make it hard to fire people (not that the law is at fault, you see people who shouldn't have been hired at all).

    > a blind eye is turned to infractions from top performers

    This is normal and it's not always bad. Some people earn their tenure, salt, prove their worth, loyalty, etc and in certain areas strict rules aren't particularly helpful. That can't be anything goes however. The infractions have to be things that don't really matter. In my experience this has for example been an issue with dress code. It gets to a point where the things you're doing are so important that arbitrary restraints become just stupid. Ultimately like a lot of things, it has to be taken on a case by case basis.

    The reports seem to lump things together. I consider only these serious offences:

    > One Uber manager groped female co-workers' breasts at a company retreat in Las Vegas.
    > Another manager threatened to beat an underperforming employee's head in with a baseball bat.
    > Uber employees did cocaine in the bathrooms at private parties

    Unfortunately cocaine use by employees seems endemic among "high performing" industries. I've seen a lot of personal use although it wont normally be brought into the work. It's not always a problem but the complete apathy does raise concern. Groping should be a zero-tolerance matter as should be issuing genuine and precise threats of violence.

    Debatable offence:

    > A director shouted a homophobic slur at a subordinate during a heated confrontation in a meeting.

    I wouldn't care about that too much unless there were more to the situation. It seems possibly more of a problem that it got that heated. If it were under my watch I might mention informally to an employee that did that to have more control. It would be a serious issue if the subordinate were actually gay and being bullied or ragged on for it or if prospective investors for ex

  10. Re:Unrevokable keys... on Iris Scans and Fingerprints Could Be Your Ticket On British Rail (silicon.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    I would say they're just particularly hard to hash or encrypt. The unrevokable key problem is more significant in the immediate sense in that once someone scans your biolmetrics...

  11. Urge Caution on Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source (theguardian.com) · · Score: 2

    Wikipedia references a hell of a lot of sources that are unreliable. I am really into geopolitical events happening that are really relevant at the moment to our lives. I read a lot on the background of things in wikipedia and it's not bad but I have found plenty of politicisating of science (on controversial biological subjects its extremely hard for wikipedia not to stay neutral), plenty of revisionist history, etc. A lot of the historical sources, potentially even all cannot be well verified. This isn't even one controversial area but everything. History is a really hard subject to have as something fully verified. Not everything is on wikipedia either. I've had to go on adventures to find things. On one major political issue on wikipedia I read a declassified intelligence report on that and it disputed a lot of what was on wikipedia on the matter which was citing a variety of sources largely newspapers and that kind of thing.

  12. Re:Gentetic modification on Scientists Successfully Decode the Genome of Quinoa (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    It's pretty funny because a vast number of species on earth have actually evolved to genetically modify themselves.

  13. Re:Stop apologizing on Scientists Successfully Decode the Genome of Quinoa (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Genetically engineering it is like cheating though. It's boring. What's the point of playing a game if you're just going to turn on cheats and win immediately? Selective breeding is far more exciting. You never know what you're going to get next.

  14. Re:Ignore them on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Aggressive Forum Users? · · Score: 1

    Sock puppets.

  15. Re:Second that on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Aggressive Forum Users? · · Score: 1

    What if it's legitimate? There are things that naturally are going to annoy people. For example I recently used a library that is meant to be close to stable and production ready but it turns out it's not quite as ready as promised. It turns out to be high maintenance, with some problems predicting how much resources it actually needs and also seems to incur drag when key features are enabled in certain situations that shouldn't be necessary. It turns out it's a lot less ready than it needs to be for wide spread adoption despite people claiming otherwise. This library has some new features that are in demand, nay desperately needed, compared to traditional libraries. However the implementation is filled with added pitfalls that you would not normally need to worry about and that I question the necessity off. I hit one of these pitfalls which was annoying but not so much as trying to fix it. When I search around the traditional solution is a joke and doesn't work without a reach around. Even with the work around the solution takes ages to run with zero effect and I end up resorting to one of the oldest tricks in the book (a generic manual old school fix) which really makes you question the validity of the libraries own tools. In searching for possible solutions online I see other people with the problem and at some point I snap and say bluntly don't use a library that does stupid things like this and that if you don't really need it. I was aggressive and pissed off but it was an appropriate outburst as well as good advice.

    I've also gone off at people for doing things like for explaining how to get an open source program working on Linux when they have downloaded the binary/pre compiled from tucows and it wont run because of a linked dynamic library version mismatch. I kid you not but his solution was to hex edit it and change the version number, for an open source program.

  16. Re:FIRST POST! on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Aggressive Forum Users? · · Score: 1

    I remember when parents were banned from the internet and for good reason as well.

  17. Re:FIRST POST! on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Aggressive Forum Users? · · Score: 1

    Yes and no. In this case it sounds like those users should just be banned or something. On a forum of a very large size then it becomes problematic if we're not talking an isolated incident. Where ever you have humans you can have human error. Both moderators and users are human.

    You are always likely to have nuisance users after the community hits a small size and normally it's not too difficult for moderators to deal with that. If you hit the point where you have millions of users on a conventional forum though, especially ones that spend a lot of time there as part of a major hobby in their lives/spend a lot of their freetime there rather than hit and run style commenting then you're going to get a few psychopaths. It's a given with that many people.

    Different communities create natural problems and have their own natural patterns and there's not always one rule for all. I've found in some situations I've found myself in a toxic atmosphere and that I've too become sometimes toxic. Real time venues is a major one. There's a big difference over the years from being mid level to senior.

    As a senior the first thing that happens is that when there you help others down the ladder to quickly clear the queue. The lower you are on the ladder the better in a sense, the lowest can in theory be helped by everyone else on the ladder. This is a great natural pattern at first but bitterness can arise quickly as you advance the ladder. Sometimes there are users that are unable to help others help them or to help themselves and not to be mean but some you wonder how they even managed to get onto the internet. Some want you to do things for them or are completely helpless. You can start to get irate because some of these people are possible the type that make your life a misery in the making, that make a huge mess and then just move on leaving people like me to untangle the legacy mess. It's alright when people are new but sometimes you can tell when there's possibly more to it than that, when they look like they don't have what it takes to not be a liability or a burden on others. Help channels can disproportionately attract those because well they're the most likely to need help and frequently. You try not to be mean or judgemental but sometimes that's difficult.

    Then you start to notice that sometimes those giving help aren't always entirely impartial and might give bad advice or push their own opinions. Sometimes you find yourself fighting against that rather than helping others. Then when it comes to your own help topics there's all kinds of problems that can lead to confrontation. Some people give you ridiculous solutions when you know it should be simpler or repeat some precept they've learnt by rote automatically without considering various nuances or potential exceptions. This is especially common when it comes to standards, ideals or concerns. Dogmatic helpers can be a huge problem. Someone learns a best practice which is really a rule of thumb and then it becomes the only practice. Pompousness and arrogance is really common. A lot of people get some way up the ladder and then it gets to them. You can have a bad case of things such as DK or people who study too much without sufficient practice. Sometimes people stick by what works for them in their unique scenario and then apply it to everyone. You have people promoting wacky solutions to scale for ten million users before concepts such as KISS and YAGNI when dealing with newbies.

    Then there's the inordinate difficulty in convincing users that you are an advanced user and to break from their traditional script. A really frustrating one is when you ask a simple question and they start to insist on knowing the problem because they think there's a better solution. I understand that, I've often had to ask people what they are trying to solve myself, but these people ask for that before even answering the question and these are basic questions. It starts to be like dealing with people in an Indian call centre who try to run you thr

  18. Re:Doing it wrong? on Developer Argues For 'Forgotten Code Constructs' Like GOTO and Eval (techbeacon.com) · · Score: 1

    Perhaps they want you to just use a stack. It can be cheaper.

  19. Re:Irony on Anonymous Takes Down 10,613 Dark Web Portals (bleepingcomputer.com) · · Score: 1

    Anonymous attacking anonymity.

  20. Re:Simple on Ask Slashdot: Why Do You Care About Tech Conferences? · · Score: 1

    I thought it was for the freebies including this little trianglar sandwiches.

  21. Simply. on Ask Slashdot: Why Do You Care About Tech Conferences? · · Score: 1

    Because I'm so ronry!

  22. Sponsored content. on It's Time To Admit Apple Watch Is a Success (imore.com) · · Score: 1

    Anything with "It's time to" is not a real article but marketing. The "It's time to *" is authoritative marketing speak. It should be black listed as spam along with: *One simple trick *" "* will shock you." "* incredible *" And so on...

  23. Re: I feel that lone sysadmin's pain on GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    That's not the pro way to do it. You can have snapshots on the FS so you can do something like restore a file as it was an hour ago. You can do similar with database replication.

  24. Ancient History on All-Corn Diet Turns Hamsters Into Cannibals · · Score: 1

    Could this explain some aspects of Aztec and Mayan culture?

  25. Make humans do it. on Can A Robot Fool 'I Am Not A Robot' Captchas? (businessinsider.com) · · Score: 1

    In the worst case you can proxy the capture. Solve it for one site solve it for another. How do you know when you fill a capture if it's one from a bot or genuine for the site? This is how: Make your own site, capture script (put it on stack overflow, npm, composer, etc everyone will copy and pasta it without checking) or something, make your bot. Your bot constantly puts captchas on a buffer. When a site needs it if the buffer is empty it generates, else it uses on off the buffer. Then it just forwards the success result. If you captcha site has good load the buffer can always be quickly consumed. Really good if you have enough control to just make it appear for a user already logged in to continue.