What I'd like to know is if offshoring these IT jobs is *just* about the money. If it's a matter of getting *quality work* for cheap, compared to American counterparts, then tightening immigration laws will put the US further behind the IT curve. If it's just about the money, firms should be able to find comparable quality stateside, but I'd like to know if there's an indication, either way, that the quality of home-grown IT grads is comparable in quality.
I got the distinct impression that the blurb makes the $3 million paid out by Google seem excessive. Considering their bug bounty program allows fixes to get rolled out quicker (manufacturers rolling out updates is a whole other matter!), this $3 million is a pittance compared to the harms that *could* be wrought if htey dind't have the program in place at all. Looks like a good investment on Google's part.
Knowing this is how foreigners are going to be treated entering the US, the workarounds seem pretty simple:
Back up your phone to a secure server, reset it to a factory install, then once through customs, connect to your secure server and reload your old phone settings.
If border agents think that this is going to stop terrorists from getting into the country, they *woefully* underestimate their adversary...We've all seen what hapens when you do that.
Except you can, for the most part, root most phones out there, write your own blob and upload it to the phone (speaking specifically to Android, here).
What aspects of a phone are DIY users locked out of? Proprietary baseband stuff, but that's necessary to ensure your phone works as a phone. Other than that, you can do whatever you want within the ecosystem of the device. The only thing stopping you is the extent to which you want to violate the warranty on the phone.
Except the "patent abuse" aspect is wholly separate from the the "lack of alternatives" argument.
Instead of spending the money to innovate *in house*, firms went with a ready-made solution from Qualcomm. Sure, that's a reasonable option, but you can't make that choice then complain that Qualcomm's your only source. Don't like the mousetrap? Build a better mousetrap. If the patent dimension is holding back the industry, then why isn't the industry calling for Qualcomm to be broken? Clearly, there's sufficient competition out there to keep that from happening, it's just that these firms don't want to face the cost of design changes, but would rather sue Qualcomm, arguing the license fees are "too high".
More importantly, and this is also on the industry, why did they adopt standards that were so closely held by a single firm? Did no one at the table of the industry standards meetings say "Hey, Qualcomm's holding a ton of patents we might need...anyone see future problems with this?" Did no consortium form to try to hold those patents within the broader group of the industry players? No, they relied on the presumption of "fair pricing" for patented standards.
I don't have much sympathy for this current state of affairs. Consumers voted with their dollars, Qualcomm delivered, and firms that integrate Qualcomm products into their flagship devices developed no fall-back. With such a piece of technology fraught with so many singe points of failure, it was just a matter of time before the ecosystem collapsed.
I'm interested to see what the latest lawsuit against Qualcomm will do for the ecosystem, too.
Well, even in places where higher education is "free", it's *never* free. Taxpayers pay. As such, taxpayers need to know the cost of the things they're paying for, and people going to school ought to be getting the most bang for that buck.
So, in countries with "free" education, do the universities bill the government a flat rate for each program, or do those costs vary depending on the cost of the major?
Also, why not boost those programs for which there's an economic need? Need electricians and welders? Promote that. Anything not that gets to pay. As the economy shifts year after year, the needs change, the focus changes, the funding changes. Wouldn't it be far more efficient to bolster the needs of society first *then* the wants second?
More importantly, can we start promoting the idea that people don't *need* a college or university degree for about 75% of the jobs in the economy? Given that most jobs in the developed world require little more than basic education (assembly line work, most service industries, etc.), the idea is ingrained in peoples' minds that they need these skills, when the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
Of course not, but look who they're trying to do business with; tell Trump what he wants to hear, so he can regurgitate numbers through Twitter, and BAM! Here's your subsidy and your permit.
When those 50k jobs don't manifest themselves, and 1000 robots are building TVs, do you really think the new administration is going to let the public see the real employment numbers?
These individuals have access to what books aren't being checked out. They know the retention/purge policy. Why not just check these books out under their own names and avoid the purge?
This...THIS is what regulators are going to choose to focus on? Seriously?
Too many people aren't dying/getting injured because of smartphones and other distractions, they're dying/getting injured because people are being idiots. How about educating people and showing them the grim result of their stupidity rather than trying to childproof the world? Right...That would mean having to actually *educate* people, and we know how well that's going in the US...
I don't think anyone has ever really believed that the vast majority of people would be made obsolete. What matters in the economic impact. Even if 15% of your human workforce is let go because of automation, that has a serious, potentially crippling, economic impact if contingencies aren't made for it.
Also, let's not pretend that there's this ceaseless, infinite capacity for innovation. Just because some innovations will lead to new jobs for humans doesn't mean that's going to offset the losses. I get that people have been sold on the broken idea of infinite economic growth, but that defies any sort of logic. The same goes for innovation.
We're looking at this within the scope of the provision of news. While it would be nice to hold someone accountable for what they write and try to pass off as truth, the slippery slope gets awful steep when you create a rule *over here* that can then be applied broadly *over there*.
Anonymity, generally, serves a very valuable purpose in society, and people are constantly hounded that only criminals and perverts want it. Ask anyone living under an authoritarian regime if they're willing to put their name to their criticisms of their regime? Ask them what they think happens to their family if they do. That's not even a contrived example, but one that people live with *daily*.
People want to get rid of anonymity for the sake of honest reporting, but that's not how it'll work: people will continue to operate within their own echo chambers because, by and large, people aren't taught to think critically about what they read. THAT is the bigger problem, not whether someone writes about XYZ while remaining anonymous. The other dimension is that the state wants to take away your anonymity to make law enforcement's job easier. I'm sorry the police have a hard time doing their job, but the cost to my personal liberty that has to be paid in order for the state to pretend it can keep me safer is too steep.
Once firms were able to fuse their business and editorial divisions journalistic integrity made way for infotainment. There's no obligation anymore to report fair and balanced news, just an obligation to increasing revenues in bolstering the share price for stockholders.
Then, couple that with anyone with a cellphone calling themselves and "alternative media" journalist, with absolutely no background in journalism or even the capacity to craft a coherent narrative of an event. It's exceedingly rare that I read a news story online that has no spelling or grammatical errors, for example, and while that doesn't necessarily take away from the veracity of a story, the ability to communicate that story is woefully lacking. When anyone can slap together something and post it to their blog, with or without any research behind it, who is anyone going to believe?
That's not so much that cash isn't anonymous, but that the store was under surveillance.
However, the link between cash and purchases is important. Given that government/law enforcement could likely scrape the transactions of its people, looking for relationships between cash withdrawals and comparable "anonymous" purchases wouldn't be a far stretch (for example, your account shows you withdrawing $2000 from your account, but a computer store within radius X shows a cash sale for $1500 plus taxes wouldn't be enough to convict, but might be enough to send an officer to the store to look for surveillance footage).
Purchase everything you connect with in cash (if you don't think a MAC address can't be linked to a specific model and the credit card used to buy it, think again).
Never connect to a network you pay for. Use free WiFi wherever you go. Build a cantenna and pick off any insecure networks around you.
Create a wireless backup close to home but hidden off the property for anything you need to store.
If you can, run your browser under an OS in a virtual machine run off a ramdisk.
Nothing like paying a ton of money for the privilege of having to purchase an additional peripheral just to do something as basic as transfer something from an SSD card...
This mentality is the result of the never-ending push to get new products to market, not with the difficulty of securing a product/technology in the first place. Hardware and software are insecure not because of some *inherent* insecurity, but because consumers demand (nay, *expect*) new products that they can consume. That consumerist conditioning drives ever-greater insecurity since, as products develop with respect to processing power, storage, and sensor capabilities, the insecurities are pushed to the back-burner, and their resolution is given lower priority than rounded corners or a sharper screen.
People get exactly what they ask for, and get to suffer the consequences for it.
I think it's difficult to lay a blanket statement of whether journalist should/should not use such emails.
For example, performing a data dump isn't journalism, and whoever does it should be held liable for damages,
However, a journalist that takes the time to confirm content, establish the context of emails, and their relevance to the larger story, is doing a service. That should be fine.
Those on the "outside" are conditioned to believe that, with enough hard work and effort, they'll eventually be on the "inside". However, those on the inside create policies to keep those on the outside, *outside*. Despite this, people still make decisions (i.e., voting) with the belief that they *might* become part o that inside group, ignoring the present (or even future) realities.
It's fantastic social propaganda, though. The economy exploits the increased productivity (assuming, of course, more work hours equates to comparable economic gains; we all know that person that does 3 hours of work in an 8 hour shift), while kindling hope in a population that prosperity is just around the corner if they just keep working harder.
"Asgardia will demonstrate to scientists throughout the world that independent, private and unrestricted research is possible."
Anyone else concerned with the implications of this statement from the site? While "independent" and "private" research aren't particularly worrisome, I'd like to know what "unrestricted" research means, especially when just above that they state: "Economical and political considerations often take precedence over purely scientific ones and ethical boundaries are considered necessary to sustain safety."
Is part of this underlying ethos the idea that ethical boundaries, as well as economical and political considerations, get in the way of scientific ones? If that's the case, I want, *even more*, to know what "unrestricted" research means. Is this an attempt to circumvent well-establish ethical oversight common across scientific domains? The only reason you'd want to circumvent ethical oversight is if you're considering doing something unethical and, sadly, we've seen far too often what happens when ethical oversight of research is disregarded.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't use social media. I think it's dumb."
What are they going to do?
What I'd like to know is if offshoring these IT jobs is *just* about the money. If it's a matter of getting *quality work* for cheap, compared to American counterparts, then tightening immigration laws will put the US further behind the IT curve. If it's just about the money, firms should be able to find comparable quality stateside, but I'd like to know if there's an indication, either way, that the quality of home-grown IT grads is comparable in quality.
I got the distinct impression that the blurb makes the $3 million paid out by Google seem excessive. Considering their bug bounty program allows fixes to get rolled out quicker (manufacturers rolling out updates is a whole other matter!), this $3 million is a pittance compared to the harms that *could* be wrought if htey dind't have the program in place at all. Looks like a good investment on Google's part.
Knowing this is how foreigners are going to be treated entering the US, the workarounds seem pretty simple:
Back up your phone to a secure server, reset it to a factory install, then once through customs, connect to your secure server and reload your old phone settings.
If border agents think that this is going to stop terrorists from getting into the country, they *woefully* underestimate their adversary...We've all seen what hapens when you do that.
Except you can, for the most part, root most phones out there, write your own blob and upload it to the phone (speaking specifically to Android, here).
What aspects of a phone are DIY users locked out of? Proprietary baseband stuff, but that's necessary to ensure your phone works as a phone. Other than that, you can do whatever you want within the ecosystem of the device. The only thing stopping you is the extent to which you want to violate the warranty on the phone.
Except the "patent abuse" aspect is wholly separate from the the "lack of alternatives" argument.
Instead of spending the money to innovate *in house*, firms went with a ready-made solution from Qualcomm. Sure, that's a reasonable option, but you can't make that choice then complain that Qualcomm's your only source. Don't like the mousetrap? Build a better mousetrap. If the patent dimension is holding back the industry, then why isn't the industry calling for Qualcomm to be broken? Clearly, there's sufficient competition out there to keep that from happening, it's just that these firms don't want to face the cost of design changes, but would rather sue Qualcomm, arguing the license fees are "too high".
More importantly, and this is also on the industry, why did they adopt standards that were so closely held by a single firm? Did no one at the table of the industry standards meetings say "Hey, Qualcomm's holding a ton of patents we might need...anyone see future problems with this?" Did no consortium form to try to hold those patents within the broader group of the industry players? No, they relied on the presumption of "fair pricing" for patented standards.
I don't have much sympathy for this current state of affairs. Consumers voted with their dollars, Qualcomm delivered, and firms that integrate Qualcomm products into their flagship devices developed no fall-back. With such a piece of technology fraught with so many singe points of failure, it was just a matter of time before the ecosystem collapsed.
I'm interested to see what the latest lawsuit against Qualcomm will do for the ecosystem, too.
Well, even in places where higher education is "free", it's *never* free. Taxpayers pay. As such, taxpayers need to know the cost of the things they're paying for, and people going to school ought to be getting the most bang for that buck.
So, in countries with "free" education, do the universities bill the government a flat rate for each program, or do those costs vary depending on the cost of the major?
Also, why not boost those programs for which there's an economic need? Need electricians and welders? Promote that. Anything not that gets to pay. As the economy shifts year after year, the needs change, the focus changes, the funding changes. Wouldn't it be far more efficient to bolster the needs of society first *then* the wants second?
More importantly, can we start promoting the idea that people don't *need* a college or university degree for about 75% of the jobs in the economy? Given that most jobs in the developed world require little more than basic education (assembly line work, most service industries, etc.), the idea is ingrained in peoples' minds that they need these skills, when the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
Of course not, but look who they're trying to do business with; tell Trump what he wants to hear, so he can regurgitate numbers through Twitter, and BAM! Here's your subsidy and your permit.
When those 50k jobs don't manifest themselves, and 1000 robots are building TVs, do you really think the new administration is going to let the public see the real employment numbers?
"Stu Gale, who just so happens to be a computer security expert,"
...and we're done.
Okay...I'm listening...
"...had the misfortune of having his laptop stolen from his car overnight."
I'm starting to think these reports have been generated via automation, too.
If you fail to change the default password of your new IP camera, or other device, I come to your house and smack you upside the head.
Where do I collect my money?
These individuals have access to what books aren't being checked out. They know the retention/purge policy. Why not just check these books out under their own names and avoid the purge?
This...THIS is what regulators are going to choose to focus on? Seriously?
Too many people aren't dying/getting injured because of smartphones and other distractions, they're dying/getting injured because people are being idiots. How about educating people and showing them the grim result of their stupidity rather than trying to childproof the world? Right...That would mean having to actually *educate* people, and we know how well that's going in the US...
Is it really a shock that, when asking about liberal-leaning ideas (i.e., minimum wage) the results are more liberal-leaning, and vice versa?
I don't think anyone has ever really believed that the vast majority of people would be made obsolete. What matters in the economic impact. Even if 15% of your human workforce is let go because of automation, that has a serious, potentially crippling, economic impact if contingencies aren't made for it.
Also, let's not pretend that there's this ceaseless, infinite capacity for innovation. Just because some innovations will lead to new jobs for humans doesn't mean that's going to offset the losses. I get that people have been sold on the broken idea of infinite economic growth, but that defies any sort of logic. The same goes for innovation.
We're looking at this within the scope of the provision of news. While it would be nice to hold someone accountable for what they write and try to pass off as truth, the slippery slope gets awful steep when you create a rule *over here* that can then be applied broadly *over there*.
Anonymity, generally, serves a very valuable purpose in society, and people are constantly hounded that only criminals and perverts want it. Ask anyone living under an authoritarian regime if they're willing to put their name to their criticisms of their regime? Ask them what they think happens to their family if they do. That's not even a contrived example, but one that people live with *daily*.
People want to get rid of anonymity for the sake of honest reporting, but that's not how it'll work: people will continue to operate within their own echo chambers because, by and large, people aren't taught to think critically about what they read. THAT is the bigger problem, not whether someone writes about XYZ while remaining anonymous. The other dimension is that the state wants to take away your anonymity to make law enforcement's job easier. I'm sorry the police have a hard time doing their job, but the cost to my personal liberty that has to be paid in order for the state to pretend it can keep me safer is too steep.
Once firms were able to fuse their business and editorial divisions journalistic integrity made way for infotainment. There's no obligation anymore to report fair and balanced news, just an obligation to increasing revenues in bolstering the share price for stockholders.
Then, couple that with anyone with a cellphone calling themselves and "alternative media" journalist, with absolutely no background in journalism or even the capacity to craft a coherent narrative of an event. It's exceedingly rare that I read a news story online that has no spelling or grammatical errors, for example, and while that doesn't necessarily take away from the veracity of a story, the ability to communicate that story is woefully lacking. When anyone can slap together something and post it to their blog, with or without any research behind it, who is anyone going to believe?
That's not so much that cash isn't anonymous, but that the store was under surveillance.
However, the link between cash and purchases is important. Given that government/law enforcement could likely scrape the transactions of its people, looking for relationships between cash withdrawals and comparable "anonymous" purchases wouldn't be a far stretch (for example, your account shows you withdrawing $2000 from your account, but a computer store within radius X shows a cash sale for $1500 plus taxes wouldn't be enough to convict, but might be enough to send an officer to the store to look for surveillance footage).
Purchase everything you connect with in cash (if you don't think a MAC address can't be linked to a specific model and the credit card used to buy it, think again). Never connect to a network you pay for. Use free WiFi wherever you go. Build a cantenna and pick off any insecure networks around you. Create a wireless backup close to home but hidden off the property for anything you need to store. If you can, run your browser under an OS in a virtual machine run off a ramdisk.
Nothing like paying a ton of money for the privilege of having to purchase an additional peripheral just to do something as basic as transfer something from an SSD card...
This mentality is the result of the never-ending push to get new products to market, not with the difficulty of securing a product/technology in the first place. Hardware and software are insecure not because of some *inherent* insecurity, but because consumers demand (nay, *expect*) new products that they can consume. That consumerist conditioning drives ever-greater insecurity since, as products develop with respect to processing power, storage, and sensor capabilities, the insecurities are pushed to the back-burner, and their resolution is given lower priority than rounded corners or a sharper screen.
People get exactly what they ask for, and get to suffer the consequences for it.
I think it's difficult to lay a blanket statement of whether journalist should/should not use such emails.
For example, performing a data dump isn't journalism, and whoever does it should be held liable for damages,
However, a journalist that takes the time to confirm content, establish the context of emails, and their relevance to the larger story, is doing a service. That should be fine.
It's the end result of the Prosperity Gospel.
Those on the "outside" are conditioned to believe that, with enough hard work and effort, they'll eventually be on the "inside". However, those on the inside create policies to keep those on the outside, *outside*. Despite this, people still make decisions (i.e., voting) with the belief that they *might* become part o that inside group, ignoring the present (or even future) realities.
It's fantastic social propaganda, though. The economy exploits the increased productivity (assuming, of course, more work hours equates to comparable economic gains; we all know that person that does 3 hours of work in an 8 hour shift), while kindling hope in a population that prosperity is just around the corner if they just keep working harder.
"Asgardia will demonstrate to scientists throughout the world that independent, private and unrestricted research is possible."
Anyone else concerned with the implications of this statement from the site? While "independent" and "private" research aren't particularly worrisome, I'd like to know what "unrestricted" research means, especially when just above that they state: "Economical and political considerations often take precedence over purely scientific ones and ethical boundaries are considered necessary to sustain safety."
Is part of this underlying ethos the idea that ethical boundaries, as well as economical and political considerations, get in the way of scientific ones? If that's the case, I want, *even more*, to know what "unrestricted" research means. Is this an attempt to circumvent well-establish ethical oversight common across scientific domains? The only reason you'd want to circumvent ethical oversight is if you're considering doing something unethical and, sadly, we've seen far too often what happens when ethical oversight of research is disregarded.