As a mental exercise, I've pondered whether it would be possible to break up Google into multiple search engines. The reality is that searching the modern web is a massive undertaking and competing against Google is really difficult. Bing is the only company currently attempting it - all of the other search engines (such as Yahoo or Duck Duck Go) either repost Bing's results or are language specific search engines that aren't interested in searching the whole web.
As I understand it, modern search engines could be broken into 3 parts: collection, organization, and display. It's the last part that everyone wants to do as it most directly affects what people see and its the best opportunity to make ad dollars. Collecting data from the web requires a massive infrastructure to do it right and it seems inevitable that most companies will narrow their focus here, prioritizing only the biggest websites, in order to save some cash. Organizing the raw data into something searchable is extremely complicated and technical; Google has spent a fortune building the technology to do this well and it is difficult for a smaller search engine to compete with them.
So if the US Government wanted to encourage competition in the search engine field, a straightforward approach would be to force Google to sell search data to 3rd parties who could then index it and display it as they will. If most companies relied on Google to organize the data, they would likely display identical results, but there would be room for all of the players to carve their own niche. A conservative focused search engine might push search results from conservative news sources, for instance.
It's not an ideal solution because it still leaves Google in a monopoly position as the engine that runs the web but it would remove a lot of their direct power over search results. I just don't see a good alternative because searching the entirety of the web requires so many that a small operator will just never be able to do it well.
I don't know if, in this case, that's a fair criticism. VFEmail is providing a realtime service and going offline for any length of time has very serious repercussions.
Tape backups aren't going to have the users' most recent emails and it could take days to fully restore prior emails. From the users' perspective, this is extremely inconvenient and they're probably going to take their recovered emails and go elsewhere.
To run an online service in today's world, particularly an email host, means continual uptime. Downtime, even to recover lost data, is not a realistic option. Service providers thus need to focus their attention on redundancy at all levels. The question they failed to ask isn't, "How do we maintain quality offline backups". Instead, it should have been, "How do we prevent a single rogue employee or hacker from destroying our company?"
That's actually a pretty good example for why this home automation stuff doesn't work so well. Obviously these systems should be aware of state and be able to turn off/on devices to match that state, but imagine the following list of instructions:
Turn the exterior lights on at dusk to 50% so guests can see my house.
When the motion detector detects motion, turn the exterior lights on full for 5 minutes.
When I'm on vacation, do not turn on the exterior lights.
The problem is, how should the system interpret these instructions? Should the owner being on vacation prevent the exterior lights from ever turning on or should they just come on due to motion? Is the user expected to program this or does the system come with pretty good default logic?
My main complaint with most of the home automation stuff out there now is that its too reliant on the cloud. It should be clear, however, that even with the massive amounts of remove processing power being thrown at these products, they still act fairly stupid and glitchy.
A company can have a 100% backup solution and it may still be worth their while to pay the ransom. The decryption process can be applied to all machines simultaneously, bringing them back online in perhaps a few hours. Alternatively, a thorough restore from tapes fetched from Iron Mountain could take a week or two.
Restoring from backup is a great solution for individuals, but large networks are unlikely to have a backup solution that can scale as well as a ransomware worm can. For large organizations, their money is best spent on preventing infection in the first place and mitigating it when it does occur.
I've been in this exact situation twice, where someone dressed in black decided to cross a darkened road directly in front of me. In both situations, I had to brake hard to prevent hitting them.
The tip-off was that I noticed lights blinking out ahead, due to something occluding them. It was an extremely subtle effect, one I would have missed if I hadn't been paying full attention, and one which I do not think AI is capable of recognizing.
Simply put, I doubt that computer based vision will meet the capabilities of humans any time soon. They would do well to rely on additional sensors to supplement for the time being.
In order for John Irving to unlock her iPhone, he enters a 6 digit PIN. Maybe Lorian Bartle uses an alphanumeric password. John and Lorian did not choose strong passwords, knowing they have to enter it every time they boot up the phone, so either phone is easily crack-able by coping the encrypted contents of their phones onto a powerful computer and brute forcing every possible password.
Apple prevents this by generating a random element that, combined with John or Lorian's passcode, makes up the encryption key. This random element is stored inside Apple's super-special security chip. The exploit that they're selling may be based around extracting or computing this random element which would still necessitate a brute-force approach, but it moves the approach into the realm of the possible.
Neural network technology scales with processor advancements, so I understand why AI researches stay so excited about throwing neural networks at everything - it just keeps getting better and better on its own. The thing is, as great as modern processors are, they aren't even close to in the same league as a biological brain. It is unrealistic to expect a computer based neural network to approach the capabilities of even a biological brain in the near future.
AI researchers will only make progress if they put in the effort to understand what they are trying to achieve and to cognitively construct the necessary algorithms. In essence, a human needs to understand why an AI does what it does. It's an extremely difficult job that requires a tremendous amount of work and applied intelligence. The dream of the magic, learning computer will continue to remain a dream until computational technology become several magnitudes more advanced.
What puzzles me is, with all of the resources that the US federal government has at their disposal, why aren't they actually trying to crack encrypted phones?
As I understand it, the older iPhones could likely be cracked by desoldering a chio and interrogating it. The newer ones have their entire security apparatus encased in a single chip but I don't see why the chip couldn't be removed, disassembled, and its partial private key extracted. It's probably not something that could be done by hand and would probably involve contracting with a chip-fabricating outfit. The outlay costs would be enormous but once a "Federal Bureau of Device Recovery" was established and operational, they could make back money by cracking phones for state and local law enforcement.
It's just so strange because it seems likely that eventually other countries will have this capability, if they don't already. My guess is that if the FBI hasn't figured out how to crack encrypted iPhones themselves in the next 5 years, they'll be a company in Israel that will be happy to do it for them.
Credit freezing is the only real protection that a consumer has against identify theft, in my opinion. Not only is it much, much cheaper than the monthly cost for credit monitoring, it proactively makes it less likely that one's identity will be stolen rather than informing after the fact.
There is a marginal cost to doing this (around $10) unless one's identify has already been stolen, in which case its free. Since these major hacks and leaks are pretty much inevitable, it seems like in the fullness of time everyone will see their identity stolen at least once. When that happens, I guess everyone will just be able to freeze their credit for free.
It would sure be nice to just skip to the inevitable end and just let everyone freeze their credit for free, now. That would be a far more welcome outcome from Equifax, offering free credit freezes, than the credit monitoring that they'll offer in their inevitable settlement.
These technical interview approaches aren't very good, in my opinion, because they basically assume that the beginning and end of all software development training happened in a second year algorithms class. Algorithms are very cool, I understand why people want to talk about them, but they represent a minority programming challenge in today's world.
Speaking only for myself, in a given month of coding I may only have to consider which algorithms I should use once or twice. The rest of my time is spent on GUI design, communicating with coworkers, working on documentation, and switching between projects. Putting aside the value of algorithms in an interview, how can the interviewer ascertain all of my other software development skills if we spend 2 hours mapping trees on a white board? I would argue that they can't, and by asking technical questions about algorithms or brainteasers, they really aren't properly evaluating the skills of a professional software developer.
It is worth considering that for a large company, perhaps with several thousand workstations, it may be more cost efficient to pay the ransom and get their systems back online within a day rather than overworking their IT staff in the hopes of getting their machines back after a week. Even if the company has full data backups, they may not have the staffing required to wipe and reinstall every computer in a reasonable amount of time.
It really does feel like an "emperor has no clothes" situation. Companies are spending billions of dollars and articles are being published daily about a technology that hasn't remotely even shown to be feasible. Sure, they've figured out how get a car to do highway driving and that's making some long distance commuters very happy. But the stuff they're talking about, like replacing Uber drivers with a computer... there's no reason to think that's even possible with our current level of technology. Moving from highway driving to city driving at least an order of magnitude more difficult to do. Building a car that can detect lane markers does not mean you're going to be able to figure out how to detect jaywalkers or interpret road cones. An effective driver needs to be able to look several cars ahead in order to navigate complicated traffic situations and there's no indication that anyone has come close to technology required do this.
What's really disappointing is that the tech community, like those of us on Slashdot, really should know better. For a website that so often displays Luddite tendencies, it's strange that so few are willing to point out that autonomous cars just aren't going to happen.
Those Singapore cars rely on not just one, but two drivers.
That's what's fascinating about the self-driving car movement. So much money, and so many promises - entire companies even are banking on a technology that doesn't exist in a meaningful way. What we get instead are pledges and advertisements that are completely disconnected from reality.
They may come eventually, but no one in the industry seriously expects to see an autonomous car that can handle city driving within the next 10 years.
Autonomous vehicles will never take off if the prerequisite is to first create a centralized traffic control system. What I think we'll see instead is autonomous vehicles taking cues from human driven vehicles via the V2V (vehicle to vehicle) communication system that will roll out in the next few years.
Tesla's vehicle already kinda does this. They used the car's GPS units to build a map of highway lanes, based on how the humans drove them, and then feed this map into their autonomous system. One can easily imagine that auto makers will continue to use shortcuts like this; perhaps a car will realize that it needs to divert around construction once it observes so many of the surrounding vehicles doing it.
When one considers what kind of behavior may emerge from this type of vehicular flocking, its easy to imagine a lot of strange and unintended consequences. Perhaps a centralized authority will eventually come about, whose job it is to manage the data that is sent to cars and massage out strange behaviors. I predict that such a thing is far in the future however, in the meantime a true autonomous vehicle will have to be able to figure out a heck of a lot of stuff on its own.
I don't know if I agree that the accident was unavoidable. The inference of the article is that the driver wasn't paying any attention at all and had surrendered the driving completely to the car.
My opinion is that Tesla's self-driving system is not nearly as safe as they claim. One doesn't have to look very hard to find videos like this one where the driver has to react to prevent the auto-pilot from causing a crash. I question how long, realistically, a production Tesla can stay on the highway before a human needs to intercede to prevent an accident.
Given enough time, and enough lawsuits, I think that Tesla will shut off their self-driving feature. It needs to be a lot robust than it current is. I can't say with any expertise, but it seems like their competitors are taking their autonomous vehicle research far more seriously with plans to install a more sophisticated sensor package on their cars.
Theoretically, it is possible to install a speed camera that measures speed very accurately. That does not mean that the speed cameras that are currently being installed are accurate.
I've received a ticket from a photo radar van that miscalculated my speed. If these systems continue to be installed everywhere, eventually you will too.
The thing that seems extremely strange to me about the walmart.com website is the sheer number of ads. And I don't mean ads for products that Walmart sells, I mean they're selling ad space for companies like Avis and Equifax through AdChoices. The result of this, for me at least, is that their site runs incredibly slow.
I invite people to navigate to the walmart.com site and take a look. What are they trying to do there? Is it that the walmart.com team is expected to be financially self supported? I would not expect a company that is as large and successful as Walmart to be insisting on something that surely can't be bringing in much money while undercutting their future.
I would also recommend looking at rsnapshot which is built on top of rsync.
I used to use a development system where the entire fire tree was mirrored at the top of every hour. Recovering old files was as simple as navigating to a different directory.
Personally, I like the rsync solution because it is filesystem agnostic. It also has been around for a long time; whatever you're trying to do, I can guarantee that someone was doing it with rsync 20 years ago.
You raise an excellent set of points. I may not trust in a computer to drive me someplace but if I could arrive at the airport and send for my car to meet me there... that could be worth quite a lot.
Agentsheets (the subject of the article) is actually pretty good. The coding is almost completely drag n' drop and each of the agents processes its code in parallel. The result is I think more intuitive for a mind that is not trained in computer logic.
Unfortunately the product is being produced by grad students which (at least in this case) means that it's overpriced and not terribly well coded. I kinda wish they had just sold the idea to Hasbro or something - it would be running on the iPad by now.
This idea of a nationwide secure network has never made much sense to me. Creating a secure network in a small organization is pretty easy but creating one that links many public and private enterprises sounds like a disaster. Gaps will inevitably appear but worse it creates a real target for someone who wishes to create harm.
I'm glad you pointed this out, I hadn't even noticed. One thing I love about my G1 is the keyboard, with Connectbot I have a surprisingly usable remote terminal in the palm of my hand.
It's a shame that keyboards are viewed only in the context of sending text messages.
As to these configuration backups, Mr. Childs kept these on a DVD he kept with him at all times. Furthermore, this DVD was encrypted and could only be decrypted using his laptop (as the encryption program required not only a password, but access to a specific file that existed on the laptop).
Can these actions be defended as anything other than job security? Unless someone has reason to think that BengalsUF is getting the story wrong, why is there so much popular defense for this guy?
A cat-hole is not always an option, depending on where you go and the season. The current expectation is that in these situations all hikers will pack their excrement out. I've observed that most people are fine with packing out trash but draw the line at feces. I think a lot of people would be fine with carrying in a little extra weight if they could minimize their interaction with their own stool.
In general I agree with you. As a puzzle game it is outstanding but the story just leaves players dazed and confused. I've read some Blow interviews and various interpretations and the game, while very well thought out, simply does not intend to lead the player to a specific outcome. Blow used every literary device in the book but in the end couldn't make a single recognizable point.
It makes me sad that the final level has one of the most brilliant videogame twists I've ever seen but ultimately it leads nowhere. If only the game had solidly been about a man reconciling a lost relationship with no mention of the Manhattan Project.
Slashdot Mirror
As a mental exercise, I've pondered whether it would be possible to break up Google into multiple search engines. The reality is that searching the modern web is a massive undertaking and competing against Google is really difficult. Bing is the only company currently attempting it - all of the other search engines (such as Yahoo or Duck Duck Go) either repost Bing's results or are language specific search engines that aren't interested in searching the whole web.
As I understand it, modern search engines could be broken into 3 parts: collection, organization, and display. It's the last part that everyone wants to do as it most directly affects what people see and its the best opportunity to make ad dollars. Collecting data from the web requires a massive infrastructure to do it right and it seems inevitable that most companies will narrow their focus here, prioritizing only the biggest websites, in order to save some cash. Organizing the raw data into something searchable is extremely complicated and technical; Google has spent a fortune building the technology to do this well and it is difficult for a smaller search engine to compete with them.
So if the US Government wanted to encourage competition in the search engine field, a straightforward approach would be to force Google to sell search data to 3rd parties who could then index it and display it as they will. If most companies relied on Google to organize the data, they would likely display identical results, but there would be room for all of the players to carve their own niche. A conservative focused search engine might push search results from conservative news sources, for instance.
It's not an ideal solution because it still leaves Google in a monopoly position as the engine that runs the web but it would remove a lot of their direct power over search results. I just don't see a good alternative because searching the entirety of the web requires so many that a small operator will just never be able to do it well.
I don't know if, in this case, that's a fair criticism. VFEmail is providing a realtime service and going offline for any length of time has very serious repercussions.
Tape backups aren't going to have the users' most recent emails and it could take days to fully restore prior emails. From the users' perspective, this is extremely inconvenient and they're probably going to take their recovered emails and go elsewhere.
To run an online service in today's world, particularly an email host, means continual uptime. Downtime, even to recover lost data, is not a realistic option. Service providers thus need to focus their attention on redundancy at all levels. The question they failed to ask isn't, "How do we maintain quality offline backups". Instead, it should have been, "How do we prevent a single rogue employee or hacker from destroying our company?"
That's actually a pretty good example for why this home automation stuff doesn't work so well. Obviously these systems should be aware of state and be able to turn off/on devices to match that state, but imagine the following list of instructions:
Turn the exterior lights on at dusk to 50% so guests can see my house.
When the motion detector detects motion, turn the exterior lights on full for 5 minutes.
When I'm on vacation, do not turn on the exterior lights.
The problem is, how should the system interpret these instructions? Should the owner being on vacation prevent the exterior lights from ever turning on or should they just come on due to motion? Is the user expected to program this or does the system come with pretty good default logic?
My main complaint with most of the home automation stuff out there now is that its too reliant on the cloud. It should be clear, however, that even with the massive amounts of remove processing power being thrown at these products, they still act fairly stupid and glitchy.
A company can have a 100% backup solution and it may still be worth their while to pay the ransom. The decryption process can be applied to all machines simultaneously, bringing them back online in perhaps a few hours. Alternatively, a thorough restore from tapes fetched from Iron Mountain could take a week or two.
Restoring from backup is a great solution for individuals, but large networks are unlikely to have a backup solution that can scale as well as a ransomware worm can. For large organizations, their money is best spent on preventing infection in the first place and mitigating it when it does occur.
I've been in this exact situation twice, where someone dressed in black decided to cross a darkened road directly in front of me. In both situations, I had to brake hard to prevent hitting them.
The tip-off was that I noticed lights blinking out ahead, due to something occluding them. It was an extremely subtle effect, one I would have missed if I hadn't been paying full attention, and one which I do not think AI is capable of recognizing.
Simply put, I doubt that computer based vision will meet the capabilities of humans any time soon. They would do well to rely on additional sensors to supplement for the time being.
In order for John Irving to unlock her iPhone, he enters a 6 digit PIN. Maybe Lorian Bartle uses an alphanumeric password. John and Lorian did not choose strong passwords, knowing they have to enter it every time they boot up the phone, so either phone is easily crack-able by coping the encrypted contents of their phones onto a powerful computer and brute forcing every possible password.
Apple prevents this by generating a random element that, combined with John or Lorian's passcode, makes up the encryption key. This random element is stored inside Apple's super-special security chip. The exploit that they're selling may be based around extracting or computing this random element which would still necessitate a brute-force approach, but it moves the approach into the realm of the possible.
Neural network technology scales with processor advancements, so I understand why AI researches stay so excited about throwing neural networks at everything - it just keeps getting better and better on its own. The thing is, as great as modern processors are, they aren't even close to in the same league as a biological brain. It is unrealistic to expect a computer based neural network to approach the capabilities of even a biological brain in the near future.
AI researchers will only make progress if they put in the effort to understand what they are trying to achieve and to cognitively construct the necessary algorithms. In essence, a human needs to understand why an AI does what it does. It's an extremely difficult job that requires a tremendous amount of work and applied intelligence. The dream of the magic, learning computer will continue to remain a dream until computational technology become several magnitudes more advanced.
What puzzles me is, with all of the resources that the US federal government has at their disposal, why aren't they actually trying to crack encrypted phones?
As I understand it, the older iPhones could likely be cracked by desoldering a chio and interrogating it. The newer ones have their entire security apparatus encased in a single chip but I don't see why the chip couldn't be removed, disassembled, and its partial private key extracted. It's probably not something that could be done by hand and would probably involve contracting with a chip-fabricating outfit. The outlay costs would be enormous but once a "Federal Bureau of Device Recovery" was established and operational, they could make back money by cracking phones for state and local law enforcement.
It's just so strange because it seems likely that eventually other countries will have this capability, if they don't already. My guess is that if the FBI hasn't figured out how to crack encrypted iPhones themselves in the next 5 years, they'll be a company in Israel that will be happy to do it for them.
Credit freezing is the only real protection that a consumer has against identify theft, in my opinion. Not only is it much, much cheaper than the monthly cost for credit monitoring, it proactively makes it less likely that one's identity will be stolen rather than informing after the fact.
There is a marginal cost to doing this (around $10) unless one's identify has already been stolen, in which case its free. Since these major hacks and leaks are pretty much inevitable, it seems like in the fullness of time everyone will see their identity stolen at least once. When that happens, I guess everyone will just be able to freeze their credit for free.
It would sure be nice to just skip to the inevitable end and just let everyone freeze their credit for free, now. That would be a far more welcome outcome from Equifax, offering free credit freezes, than the credit monitoring that they'll offer in their inevitable settlement.
These technical interview approaches aren't very good, in my opinion, because they basically assume that the beginning and end of all software development training happened in a second year algorithms class. Algorithms are very cool, I understand why people want to talk about them, but they represent a minority programming challenge in today's world.
Speaking only for myself, in a given month of coding I may only have to consider which algorithms I should use once or twice. The rest of my time is spent on GUI design, communicating with coworkers, working on documentation, and switching between projects. Putting aside the value of algorithms in an interview, how can the interviewer ascertain all of my other software development skills if we spend 2 hours mapping trees on a white board? I would argue that they can't, and by asking technical questions about algorithms or brainteasers, they really aren't properly evaluating the skills of a professional software developer.
BACKUP YOUR SHIT
It is worth considering that for a large company, perhaps with several thousand workstations, it may be more cost efficient to pay the ransom and get their systems back online within a day rather than overworking their IT staff in the hopes of getting their machines back after a week. Even if the company has full data backups, they may not have the staffing required to wipe and reinstall every computer in a reasonable amount of time.
It really does feel like an "emperor has no clothes" situation. Companies are spending billions of dollars and articles are being published daily about a technology that hasn't remotely even shown to be feasible. Sure, they've figured out how get a car to do highway driving and that's making some long distance commuters very happy. But the stuff they're talking about, like replacing Uber drivers with a computer... there's no reason to think that's even possible with our current level of technology. Moving from highway driving to city driving at least an order of magnitude more difficult to do. Building a car that can detect lane markers does not mean you're going to be able to figure out how to detect jaywalkers or interpret road cones. An effective driver needs to be able to look several cars ahead in order to navigate complicated traffic situations and there's no indication that anyone has come close to technology required do this.
What's really disappointing is that the tech community, like those of us on Slashdot, really should know better. For a website that so often displays Luddite tendencies, it's strange that so few are willing to point out that autonomous cars just aren't going to happen.
Those Singapore cars rely on not just one, but two drivers.
That's what's fascinating about the self-driving car movement. So much money, and so many promises - entire companies even are banking on a technology that doesn't exist in a meaningful way. What we get instead are pledges and advertisements that are completely disconnected from reality.
They may come eventually, but no one in the industry seriously expects to see an autonomous car that can handle city driving within the next 10 years.
Autonomous vehicles will never take off if the prerequisite is to first create a centralized traffic control system. What I think we'll see instead is autonomous vehicles taking cues from human driven vehicles via the V2V (vehicle to vehicle) communication system that will roll out in the next few years.
Tesla's vehicle already kinda does this. They used the car's GPS units to build a map of highway lanes, based on how the humans drove them, and then feed this map into their autonomous system. One can easily imagine that auto makers will continue to use shortcuts like this; perhaps a car will realize that it needs to divert around construction once it observes so many of the surrounding vehicles doing it.
When one considers what kind of behavior may emerge from this type of vehicular flocking, its easy to imagine a lot of strange and unintended consequences. Perhaps a centralized authority will eventually come about, whose job it is to manage the data that is sent to cars and massage out strange behaviors. I predict that such a thing is far in the future however, in the meantime a true autonomous vehicle will have to be able to figure out a heck of a lot of stuff on its own.
My opinion is that Tesla's self-driving system is not nearly as safe as they claim. One doesn't have to look very hard to find videos like this one where the driver has to react to prevent the auto-pilot from causing a crash. I question how long, realistically, a production Tesla can stay on the highway before a human needs to intercede to prevent an accident.
Given enough time, and enough lawsuits, I think that Tesla will shut off their self-driving feature. It needs to be a lot robust than it current is. I can't say with any expertise, but it seems like their competitors are taking their autonomous vehicle research far more seriously with plans to install a more sophisticated sensor package on their cars.
Theoretically, it is possible to install a speed camera that measures speed very accurately. That does not mean that the speed cameras that are currently being installed are accurate.
I've received a ticket from a photo radar van that miscalculated my speed. If these systems continue to be installed everywhere, eventually you will too.
I invite people to navigate to the walmart.com site and take a look. What are they trying to do there? Is it that the walmart.com team is expected to be financially self supported? I would not expect a company that is as large and successful as Walmart to be insisting on something that surely can't be bringing in much money while undercutting their future.
I used to use a development system where the entire fire tree was mirrored at the top of every hour. Recovering old files was as simple as navigating to a different directory.
Personally, I like the rsync solution because it is filesystem agnostic. It also has been around for a long time; whatever you're trying to do, I can guarantee that someone was doing it with rsync 20 years ago.
You raise an excellent set of points. I may not trust in a computer to drive me someplace but if I could arrive at the airport and send for my car to meet me there... that could be worth quite a lot.
Agentsheets (the subject of the article) is actually pretty good. The coding is almost completely drag n' drop and each of the agents processes its code in parallel. The result is I think more intuitive for a mind that is not trained in computer logic. Unfortunately the product is being produced by grad students which (at least in this case) means that it's overpriced and not terribly well coded. I kinda wish they had just sold the idea to Hasbro or something - it would be running on the iPad by now.
This idea of a nationwide secure network has never made much sense to me. Creating a secure network in a small organization is pretty easy but creating one that links many public and private enterprises sounds like a disaster. Gaps will inevitably appear but worse it creates a real target for someone who wishes to create harm.
It's a shame that keyboards are viewed only in the context of sending text messages.
As to these configuration backups, Mr. Childs kept these on a DVD he kept with him at all times. Furthermore, this DVD was encrypted and could only be decrypted using his laptop (as the encryption program required not only a password, but access to a specific file that existed on the laptop).
Can these actions be defended as anything other than job security? Unless someone has reason to think that BengalsUF is getting the story wrong, why is there so much popular defense for this guy?
A cat-hole is not always an option, depending on where you go and the season. The current expectation is that in these situations all hikers will pack their excrement out. I've observed that most people are fine with packing out trash but draw the line at feces. I think a lot of people would be fine with carrying in a little extra weight if they could minimize their interaction with their own stool.
It makes me sad that the final level has one of the most brilliant videogame twists I've ever seen but ultimately it leads nowhere. If only the game had solidly been about a man reconciling a lost relationship with no mention of the Manhattan Project.