But all desktop software is now identity-critical
on
Geekonomics
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem is that with the rise of 1) mass e-commerce, e-government and Internet banking, and 2) Internet-enabled desktops, now EVERY piece of conceivably internet-facing software installed on a consumer desktop carries the risk of exploitation, criminal intrusion and identity theft.
Yes, a security hole in a web browser won't directly cause loss of *life*. However, what it *can* do by allowing a trojan in is:
a) Drain all your life savings from your bank b) Place illegal pornography on your computer, leading to serious prison time c) Propagate spam, worms, viruses and botnet epidemics d) Activate your webcam remotely and film you in your bedroom e) Directly financially support criminal organisations
Those are now serious enough consequences - and given a single security hole in a mass-produced product, easy to reproduce on a mass planet-wide scale - that ALL developers of even the most trivial desktop software need to start thinking in terms of the kind of hard security requirements of banking, military, avionics and medical gear.
But they're not, because they haven't caught up with reality.
At least in Australasia, a split tariff of speed + bandwidth has been the norm pretty much ever since charging-per-minute-online went away. We've not generally had pure 'flat rate' deals, except for some very shonky providers who went out of business rapidly. I've been watching the debates here over 'tubes' and filtering and wondering just what's going on in the USA, that people think they can get unlimited amounts of data transfer for free with no consequences - and then resort to weird restrictive contracts and double-dipping 'hold the website to ransom' schemes - instead of just simply paying for transfer capacity.
This looks like a sensible solution all round, to me.
"On the most basic level you have people who physically threaten you; vote this way or we hurt you, your family, your business. Moving up in sophistication, though, you can stand to lose all sorts of things; you didn't vote the company line? No job for you. Worst is that it allows the government that gets elected to single out and quash people who did not vote for it. Oh, you didn't vote for Bush? Well, I hope you want a vacation to Cuba..."
And yet, to vote in a primary you have to be publically registered as a member of that party!
Which seems to kinda put the whole secret ballot thing to shame. Sure, nobody knows *which* Democrat you voted for in the Presidentials, but they know you voted for *one* of them... you pinko Commie-lovin' freak. Not hard to figure out your political preferences from that.
At least that's how it seems to this non-US resident - please tell me the system's not quite so transparently broken as it seems?
I guess you guys still don't have those in America. Here in Australasia, they're ubiquitous: you pay a monthly fee for a data rate, and that comes with X 'free' gigabytes of data transfer. If you go over that, you pay for another block.
It's a nice, neat, simple system and works well, but it means that if I open my home WiFi to strangers, I'm not just providing a free service, I'm making myself directly financially liable to the tune of $1/GB in over-usage charges if someone fires up BitTorrent.
Maybe that's not so bad, but I've seen torrents chew up over 5 gigabytes in a couple days (upload and download traffic gets billed together) when left running. I'm a good neighbour, but do I *need* to finance someone else's illegal DVD rip collection if it costs me a couple hundred or thousand dollars a year?
"So what happened? Did I miss something? Who killed Firewire?"
Patent royalties, I believe, or at least that's the popular impression: this guy seems to be saying that Steve Jobs attempted to hike the royalty price and though he wasn't ultimately successful, perhaps the mere suggestion that he could was enough to sour third party implementors and move them to USB.
Like with Token Ring vs Ethernet and Objective-C vs C++, the answer seems to be that if there's a nearly-almost-good-enough open technology and a way-cool but closed/expensive technology fighting for the same market with no network effects yet in place, the open (at least in terms of free-to-implement) one wins.
Isn't it fairly obvious that Hillary's policies will be exactly the same as Bill Clinton's? It's not like there's a lot of leeway for unexpected surprises here.
You can like or dislike Hillary based on what you think of Bill's political alignments, and that's perfectly valid. To some people she's too far left, to others too far right. Object to her politics, certainly.
But disliking her because you think she's dishonest... huh? She's the default, *vanilla* candidate. A dynasty. The taste you've had for eight years in the '90s and for better or for worse, demonstrated itself.
"It's too bad the privatized companies (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Armadillo) can't ramp up development to meet the need. Oddly enough, *their* space race will produce the only results that will actually lower the cost per pound to orbit."
But will it, actually? Is there any reason to believe so? The space privatization movement keeps asserting this - that private launch costs will 'of course' be cheaper than a fully funded and nationally coordinated public effort - and seems to take it as an article of deep faith. But I've yet to hear a coherent argument as to *why*, let alone factual proof.
So far, the experience of Scaled Composites and Armadillo Aerospace is underwhelming to me, to say the least. 50 years of engineering hindsight later and with the advantage of state-of-the-art materials and computers, private groups have managed to reproduce not-quite-Mercury-level suborbital flight. That's the future?
Assuming some of these groups manage to get to the full orbital phase without killing lots of people, find a serious paying reason for manned spaceflight that NASA hasn't discovered yet, and attract far-sighted venture capital (possibly an oxymoron in itself) - what then? Has it crossed any of the space activist crowd's minds that perhaps the *reason* why the US Government hasn't been keen on massively decentralised space development is military? In that, the USAF wants to keep its current full-spectrum dominance of the high frontier, and they'd much rather work with a single compliant agency like NASA than zillions of private space cowboys toting rockets with the ability to deliver unpleasant payloads anywhere on Earth and the potential to sell that capability to interested transnational parties?
If a fully privatized manned space market actually eventuates, expect a corresponding explosion of US military space involvement to counteract all those 'potential terrorist threats'. And expect the price tag for that to not be cheap, and to come from your taxes, and your personal liberty. Combine that with space launch capacity split between a bunch of warring corporations making less profit than they initially expected, and each hiding their own innovations behind a wall of commercial secrecy, rather than releasing their science to the government, and the end result might be that the cost of space access *increases* overall.
Being not an American, and coming from a country (New Zealand) where broadband Internet access is metered in gigabyte chunks, so if your neighbour borrows your bandwidth you can get a Very Large Bill, I can't actually tell whether Bruce's comment is sarcastic or serious.
I mean, in the USA, *could* you let neighbours use your open WiFi point *without* paying huge $$$ in over-usage charges? If you could, then I guess I'd be happy with running an open access point myself, as long as I implemented my own local encryption for the data I cared about.
"The thing is, they're completely wrong. It's actually the other way around, for the simple reason that news aggregators produce no useful content of their own."
That's not actually true. The act of aggregation itself creates information: it brings news articles -- and news sources - to our attention which we wouldn't otherwise know about. What they create is metadata, and that's hugely valuable.
In a perfect world where all sites used and respected HTML meta tags, or Dublin Core markups or something, and did so thoroughly, sensibly and never abused them or lied about the categorisation of content, perhaps we could get by without needing third-party search and aggregation services. Maybe. And in a perfect world where sites didn't store information in silly non-browseable formats like, eg, PDF instead of HTML, we wouldn't need things like Google Cache to make them halfway readable. But we don't, and that's why aggregation exists.
I think an aggregator shouldn't strip out all links back to the original source, and should make it clear that there is more at the site to be investigated. But don't they do that anyway? One of the reasons why I don't read blogs via RSS yet is that I feel claustrophobic if I can't see the surrounding context of a blog: the skin, the about page, the comments (especially the comments). I guess it amazes me that there would be people who would *only* read, say, Google News or antiwar.com headlines and not read the full article.
Not sure if you were making an oblique joke-on-a-joke or not, but if you didn't know, Thomas Bowdler's 'Family Shakespeare' in 1818 is in fact the source of the verb 'to bowdlerise'.
"Microsoft Office has just finished redesigning almost the entire UI of Office in their new release, and it's been received pretty well."
Yeah, um. About that. It's not been received well AT ALL in my workplace. We hate the new Office UI with a passion. It's big, it's loud, it's hugely confusing, it can't be customised, and by ditching the menu bar it throws out 23 years of consistent interface design philosophy in one swoop.
However, we're moving to it, because we're a tertiary education provider and we feel we have to teach "what's out there in the market". In other words, we have no choice, we're being driven into this.
The Asymmetric Threat Response and Analysis Project, known as ATRAP, is a massively complex set of computer algorithms (mathematical procedures) that sift through millions of pieces of data.
"It comes down to tuning for the target environment. A car is not a boat. A plane is not a car. Shoes are not wheels. Targeting two has predictable results: Everyone is let down."
Or vivisection. Or human-embryo hybridization. The human race has survived for quite a while without these technologies so far. Why do we need them by next Thursday, ethical downsides be damned?
Just a thought. I know it's radical. Call me crazy.
Oh, who am I kidding? Just press X to Harvest. It's not a real little girl, is it? I trust Atlas.
All of the parallel programming paradigms we've seen so far just hurt my head in a 'but but that's not the Right Thing' kind of way. I'm not sure what the Right Thing to do is, but I'm sure multithreading ain't it, and even Haskell strikes me as overcomplicated for what ought to be a very simple solution if we just looked at it a little differently.
I think we need immutability and instruction-level parallelism at least, just to get halfway sane, and then a few new abstractions on top of that. The idea of 'views' is something that keeps circling around my head, and I'm trying to tease my brain into explaining what it means on my Livejournal - but as a first cut, I think Occam and Carl Hewitt's 'Ether' (and to a lesser extent, the Japanese Fifth Generation Project's KL-1) were heading toward the right track.
Of course, I don't have a formal CS background, so I may be just gibbering incoherently, but words are cheap and this stuff sure is fun to dream about.
"Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. "
This is a claim often made by advocates of science who are unaware of (or hostile to) the verified existence of the paranormal. And yet, serious practice of the scientific method has uncovered many phenomena which don't fit the materialist paradigm, and which may challenge fundamentalist religion also, but seem to map more closely onto a spiritual view of the universe. What word other than miracle are we to use to describe healings without physical cause, or anomalous knowing, for example?
If you are seriously interested in the intersection of true science and the true miraculous, try these recent books:
Miracles do exist, they are not just 'pseudoscience, and honestly confronting them will be the #1 challenge of the 21st century. And perhaps it may make us a little more accepting and less venomously hostile towards traditional cultures who know that these things are real and don't buy our studied disbelief.
"But they also maintain a secret language to encode information about thousands of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science, that the Kallawayas use as remedies. The navigational skills of peoples in Micronesia, meanwhile, are similarly encoded in small, vulnerable languages, Harrison said."
Fascinating... so languages can be sort of like embodied data structures (or the Lisp idea of procedural knowledge representation)... without those words, we lose that knowledge. We *could* learn each language, deconstruct the word forms, and port all that subtle knowledge into something like English... but that's a heck of a lot of legacy, debugged code to be ripping through. Seems like it would be simpler to preserve the culture and thus keep that code running.
"Something is either unique or it isn't. There's no "Somewhat unique", or "very unique"."
This is trivially disprovable. Any collection of objects can have a mixture of unique and shared elements. What do you call the result other than 'partially unique'? Take a Linux distribution, or human DNA, for instance. We have unique bits - a tiny fraction of the whole - and we have this vast sea of shared bits.
It seems to me that it's perfectly sensible to say '25% of this collection is unique', and therefore to say 'this collection as a whole is 25% unique'.
An entity which was '100% unique' would be utterly alien to us, by the way. We'd have absolutely no referents for it at all. It probably wouldn't even exist in our spacetime universe, because by so doing it would share phenomena with many other objects and thus compromise its uniqueness.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that with the rise of 1) mass e-commerce, e-government and Internet banking, and 2) Internet-enabled desktops, now EVERY piece of conceivably internet-facing software installed on a consumer desktop carries the risk of exploitation, criminal intrusion and identity theft.
Yes, a security hole in a web browser won't directly cause loss of *life*. However, what it *can* do by allowing a trojan in is:
a) Drain all your life savings from your bank
b) Place illegal pornography on your computer, leading to serious prison time
c) Propagate spam, worms, viruses and botnet epidemics
d) Activate your webcam remotely and film you in your bedroom
e) Directly financially support criminal organisations
Those are now serious enough consequences - and given a single security hole in a mass-produced product, easy to reproduce on a mass planet-wide scale - that ALL developers of even the most trivial desktop software need to start thinking in terms of the kind of hard security requirements of banking, military, avionics and medical gear.
But they're not, because they haven't caught up with reality.
Better hurry up and build that Internet censorship proxy fast, the Chinese are beating us at that one too.
... given that Italian Fascism was founded on *opposing* Marxism?
At least in Australasia, a split tariff of speed + bandwidth has been the norm pretty much ever since charging-per-minute-online went away. We've not generally had pure 'flat rate' deals, except for some very shonky providers who went out of business rapidly. I've been watching the debates here over 'tubes' and filtering and wondering just what's going on in the USA, that people think they can get unlimited amounts of data transfer for free with no consequences - and then resort to weird restrictive contracts and double-dipping 'hold the website to ransom' schemes - instead of just simply paying for transfer capacity.
This looks like a sensible solution all round, to me.
... what you think it means.
puissant
Pronunciation:
\-snt, -snt\
Function:
adjective
Date:
15th century
: having puissance : powerful
Perhaps you meant pissant?
I can see a HUGE market for those.
Or ponikeys, for the guys.
Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a present for you?
"On the most basic level you have people who physically threaten you; vote this way or we hurt you, your family, your business. Moving up in sophistication, though, you can stand to lose all sorts of things; you didn't vote the company line? No job for you. Worst is that it allows the government that gets elected to single out and quash people who did not vote for it. Oh, you didn't vote for Bush? Well, I hope you want a vacation to Cuba..."
And yet, to vote in a primary you have to be publically registered as a member of that party!
Which seems to kinda put the whole secret ballot thing to shame. Sure, nobody knows *which* Democrat you voted for in the Presidentials, but they know you voted for *one* of them... you pinko Commie-lovin' freak. Not hard to figure out your political preferences from that.
At least that's how it seems to this non-US resident - please tell me the system's not quite so transparently broken as it seems?
I guess you guys still don't have those in America. Here in Australasia, they're ubiquitous: you pay a monthly fee for a data rate, and that comes with X 'free' gigabytes of data transfer. If you go over that, you pay for another block.
It's a nice, neat, simple system and works well, but it means that if I open my home WiFi to strangers, I'm not just providing a free service, I'm making myself directly financially liable to the tune of $1/GB in over-usage charges if someone fires up BitTorrent.
Maybe that's not so bad, but I've seen torrents chew up over 5 gigabytes in a couple days (upload and download traffic gets billed together) when left running. I'm a good neighbour, but do I *need* to finance someone else's illegal DVD rip collection if it costs me a couple hundred or thousand dollars a year?
"So what happened? Did I miss something? Who killed Firewire?"
Patent royalties, I believe, or at least that's the popular impression: this guy seems to be saying that Steve Jobs attempted to hike the royalty price and though he wasn't ultimately successful, perhaps the mere suggestion that he could was enough to sour third party implementors and move them to USB.
Like with Token Ring vs Ethernet and Objective-C vs C++, the answer seems to be that if there's a nearly-almost-good-enough open technology and a way-cool but closed/expensive technology fighting for the same market with no network effects yet in place, the open (at least in terms of free-to-implement) one wins.
Isn't it fairly obvious that Hillary's policies will be exactly the same as Bill Clinton's? It's not like there's a lot of leeway for unexpected surprises here.
You can like or dislike Hillary based on what you think of Bill's political alignments, and that's perfectly valid. To some people she's too far left, to others too far right. Object to her politics, certainly.
But disliking her because you think she's dishonest... huh? She's the default, *vanilla* candidate. A dynasty. The taste you've had for eight years in the '90s and for better or for worse, demonstrated itself.
"It's too bad the privatized companies (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Armadillo) can't ramp up development to meet the need. Oddly enough, *their* space race will produce the only results that will actually lower the cost per pound to orbit."
But will it, actually? Is there any reason to believe so? The space privatization movement keeps asserting this - that private launch costs will 'of course' be cheaper than a fully funded and nationally coordinated public effort - and seems to take it as an article of deep faith. But I've yet to hear a coherent argument as to *why*, let alone factual proof.
So far, the experience of Scaled Composites and Armadillo Aerospace is underwhelming to me, to say the least. 50 years of engineering hindsight later and with the advantage of state-of-the-art materials and computers, private groups have managed to reproduce not-quite-Mercury-level suborbital flight. That's the future?
Assuming some of these groups manage to get to the full orbital phase without killing lots of people, find a serious paying reason for manned spaceflight that NASA hasn't discovered yet, and attract far-sighted venture capital (possibly an oxymoron in itself) - what then? Has it crossed any of the space activist crowd's minds that perhaps the *reason* why the US Government hasn't been keen on massively decentralised space development is military? In that, the USAF wants to keep its current full-spectrum dominance of the high frontier, and they'd much rather work with a single compliant agency like NASA than zillions of private space cowboys toting rockets with the ability to deliver unpleasant payloads anywhere on Earth and the potential to sell that capability to interested transnational parties?
If a fully privatized manned space market actually eventuates, expect a corresponding explosion of US military space involvement to counteract all those 'potential terrorist threats'. And expect the price tag for that to not be cheap, and to come from your taxes, and your personal liberty. Combine that with space launch capacity split between a bunch of warring corporations making less profit than they initially expected, and each hiding their own innovations behind a wall of commercial secrecy, rather than releasing their science to the government, and the end result might be that the cost of space access *increases* overall.
So: got numbers to prove that won't be the case?
Being not an American, and coming from a country (New Zealand) where broadband Internet access is metered in gigabyte chunks, so if your neighbour borrows your bandwidth you can get a Very Large Bill, I can't actually tell whether Bruce's comment is sarcastic or serious.
I mean, in the USA, *could* you let neighbours use your open WiFi point *without* paying huge $$$ in over-usage charges? If you could, then I guess I'd be happy with running an open access point myself, as long as I implemented my own local encryption for the data I cared about.
"The thing is, they're completely wrong. It's actually the other way around, for the simple reason that news aggregators produce no useful content of their own."
That's not actually true. The act of aggregation itself creates information: it brings news articles -- and news sources - to our attention which we wouldn't otherwise know about. What they create is metadata, and that's hugely valuable.
In a perfect world where all sites used and respected HTML meta tags, or Dublin Core markups or something, and did so thoroughly, sensibly and never abused them or lied about the categorisation of content, perhaps we could get by without needing third-party search and aggregation services. Maybe. And in a perfect world where sites didn't store information in silly non-browseable formats like, eg, PDF instead of HTML, we wouldn't need things like Google Cache to make them halfway readable. But we don't, and that's why aggregation exists.
I think an aggregator shouldn't strip out all links back to the original source, and should make it clear that there is more at the site to be investigated. But don't they do that anyway? One of the reasons why I don't read blogs via RSS yet is that I feel claustrophobic if I can't see the surrounding context of a blog: the skin, the about page, the comments (especially the comments). I guess it amazes me that there would be people who would *only* read, say, Google News or antiwar.com headlines and not read the full article.
Not sure if you were making an oblique joke-on-a-joke or not, but if you didn't know, Thomas Bowdler's 'Family Shakespeare' in 1818 is in fact the source of the verb 'to bowdlerise'.
"Microsoft Office has just finished redesigning almost the entire UI of Office in their new release, and it's been received pretty well."
Yeah, um. About that. It's not been received well AT ALL in my workplace. We hate the new Office UI with a passion. It's big, it's loud, it's hugely confusing, it can't be customised, and by ditching the menu bar it throws out 23 years of consistent interface design philosophy in one swoop.
However, we're moving to it, because we're a tertiary education provider and we feel we have to teach "what's out there in the market". In other words, we have no choice, we're being driven into this.
We're not looking forward to the switch.
The Asymmetric Threat Response and Analysis Project, known as ATRAP, is a massively complex set of computer algorithms (mathematical procedures) that sift through millions of pieces of data.
They come right out and say it...
"It comes down to tuning for the target environment. A car is not a boat. A plane is not a car. Shoes are not wheels. Targeting two has predictable results: Everyone is let down."
Or, you get rollerskates.
Or vivisection. Or human-embryo hybridization. The human race has survived for quite a while without these technologies so far. Why do we need them by next Thursday, ethical downsides be damned?
Just a thought. I know it's radical. Call me crazy.
Oh, who am I kidding? Just press X to Harvest. It's not a real little girl, is it? I trust Atlas.
fixed link
All of the parallel programming paradigms we've seen so far just hurt my head in a 'but but that's not the Right Thing' kind of way. I'm not sure what the Right Thing to do is, but I'm sure multithreading ain't it, and even Haskell strikes me as overcomplicated for what ought to be a very simple solution if we just looked at it a little differently.
I think we need immutability and instruction-level parallelism at least, just to get halfway sane, and then a few new abstractions on top of that. The idea of 'views' is something that keeps circling around my head, and I'm trying to tease my brain into explaining what it means on my Livejournal - but as a first cut, I think Occam and Carl Hewitt's 'Ether' (and to a lesser extent, the Japanese Fifth Generation Project's KL-1) were heading toward the right track.
Of course, I don't have a formal CS background, so I may be just gibbering incoherently, but words are cheap and this stuff sure is fun to dream about.
"Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. "
This is a claim often made by advocates of science who are unaware of (or hostile to) the verified existence of the paranormal. And yet, serious practice of the scientific method has uncovered many phenomena which don't fit the materialist paradigm, and which may challenge fundamentalist religion also, but seem to map more closely onto a spiritual view of the universe. What word other than miracle are we to use to describe healings without physical cause, or anomalous knowing, for example?
If you are seriously interested in the intersection of true science and the true miraculous, try these recent books:
Irreducible Mind by Kelly et al.
(This one is a huge mothership of a book, university textbook level. You may find the next two more readable for an introduction to the field).
Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Mayer.
Entangled Minds by Dean Radin.
Miracles do exist, they are not just 'pseudoscience, and honestly confronting them will be the #1 challenge of the 21st century. And perhaps it may make us a little more accepting and less venomously hostile towards traditional cultures who know that these things are real and don't buy our studied disbelief.
"But they also maintain a secret language to encode information about thousands of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science, that the Kallawayas use as remedies. The navigational skills of peoples in Micronesia, meanwhile, are similarly encoded in small, vulnerable languages, Harrison said."
Fascinating... so languages can be sort of like embodied data structures (or the Lisp idea of procedural knowledge representation)... without those words, we lose that knowledge. We *could* learn each language, deconstruct the word forms, and port all that subtle knowledge into something like English... but that's a heck of a lot of legacy, debugged code to be ripping through. Seems like it would be simpler to preserve the culture and thus keep that code running.
"Something is either unique or it isn't. There's no "Somewhat unique", or "very unique"."
This is trivially disprovable. Any collection of objects can have a mixture of unique and shared elements. What do you call the result other than 'partially unique'? Take a Linux distribution, or human DNA, for instance. We have unique bits - a tiny fraction of the whole - and we have this vast sea of shared bits.
It seems to me that it's perfectly sensible to say '25% of this collection is unique', and therefore to say 'this collection as a whole is 25% unique'.
An entity which was '100% unique' would be utterly alien to us, by the way. We'd have absolutely no referents for it at all. It probably wouldn't even exist in our spacetime universe, because by so doing it would share phenomena with many other objects and thus compromise its uniqueness.
... and so say all of us.
Oops, wrong 10th birthday celebration.
Happy birthday Slashy anyway!
'Us cops don't get paid enough to go home in a box'
My city, two nights ago. First police shooting in three years. The dead guy didn't have a gun.