I'm not enough of an engineer to be sure, but I think everything you say makes sense, especially about the guy wires. Given the limitations of my Japanese, it would take a lot of effort to find out if the new standards require them, though I rather think not.
I think the real problem in this specific case was broken economics. The turbine was already decommissioned and producing no value, but no one wanted to pay to take it down. Or perhaps you could say that the value of the salvaged materials was too low? The cost of the clean up when it collapsed was regarded as acceptable? Or was anyone thinking that far ahead?
As you noted, this wasn't a particularly strong typhoon. But we did have a bunch of them this year and I'm pretty sure it's strongly related to the record heat. As it affects the typhoons, the key data is the surface water temperature. As long as the typhoon is moving over water above a certain temperature, the typhoon tends to get stronger. Those sufficiently warm areas are getting larger each season... We actually had a period where 5 typhoons were spawned in 5 days.
No mention in the story or the visible comments, but the story was covered on the news a couple of days ago. The construction standards were improved a few years after this turbine was built. Can't say it will never happen again, but the newer turbines are stronger.
The same typhoon also destroyed a lighthouse. Looked like a pretty tough one, and not that tall, either. This was basically a nasty typhoon.
Every Libertarian with whom I've had such a discussion has mostly convinced me that he doesn't actually understand his worship words. My sig is actually a kind of key, but I'll go ahead and include the longer version (but still somewhat constrained by Slashdot font restrictions):
I bet I could do at least 18 minutes TED-style on it, but I doubt you can figure out any of it. The typical Libertarian tends to get especially confused about the last term. Hint: There is no perfect knowledge.
I think you can advocate for a completely different form of capitalism if you stop with the money and start with the time. Every one-dimensional metric is dubious, but money is perhaps the most meaningless. In joke form, the bean counters know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
[Several futile attempts to paste the link later...]
No can do. Anyway, the unlinkable [on Slashdot] article is a Wikipedia article about "What's that got to do with the..." I got there via some search like "with the price of tea".
Really hard to imagine what the "insightful" mod is for. Maybe the sig? Nothing in the story about "socialism", so that can't be it. Some sort of insight in attacking double-quoted scientists? Yeah, that's probably how Slashdot works now.
I think the real problem is that economists are too stupid and lazy. They focus on money because it's easy to count. "The light is better over here." These are not the solutions you're looking for, but you (that's y'all plus the economists) don't know where else to look.
When you rethink things in terms of time, the situation suddenly becomes much more clear. But is a Slashdot discussion worth the effort to rehash Ekronomics 101 yet one more time? I guess not. Yeah, it might lead towards a solution approach, but what's that got to do with the price of tea in China? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_that_got_to_do_with_the...%3F needs a Slashdot version?)
So how about the topic of pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation to help drive the solutions? It's surprisingly relevant if you're thinking about the problems from the time-based perspective. But again, it doesn't seem worth the effort here.
Interesting story. I wish the Slashdot discussion lived up to it, but so far I haven't found any trace. Usual searches, etc.
It would be nice to blame this opening post. Too bad it buries the actual insight, notwithstanding the typical first-post mod. The value and price of the ebook reflects supply and demand, but these are not the supplies and demands you are looking for.
The suckers... Er, Of course I mean the customers are paying extra for the convenience. Same as it ever was if you think about it wrong. (Searching on "convenience", I discovered a couple of relevant thoughts, but not moderated appropriately. Again the Slashdot moderation is failing to do its job.)
What is actually important is the TIME spent reading those books, and economists don't care because time is so hard to count compared to money. On one hand, we all live it and experience it exactly the same way. On the second hand, no one knows how much they really have. On the third hand, not all uses of time are equal in the pursuit of happiness, but on the fourth hand, we all value time quite highly. Lots more hands to go, but my main point is that the best new way to think about the economy that I've found involves putting the cart of money BEHIND the horse of time.
Now about that Capitalism without Capital book... Ah, I see a copy in a not so local library, but I can make the journey soon enough. I hate being an early adopter, but I'm happy to be an early rejecter of Amazon. Almost two decades of being Amazon-cancer free.
Other references? Most relevant one seems to be The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin. Or perhaps Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz?
*DING* That must mean it's time for Ekronomics 101 yet again, but I've about run out of the time I want to spend on this reply. If anyone is interested, I might continue later--hopefully within the strict time limits of stories on Slashdot.
If I ever got a mod point I'd probably give that one a funny, though there's an element of insight, too. Other aspects of the problems are too obvious for comment.
Instead, I'll just ask again for solution approaches. Obviously signed code from reliable sources is one, but I'd prefer to see the Google stop abusing everyone and start using some of the information in our favor. In the Android app case, that would involve sharing the financial information to help the potential victims recognize the probably crooks.
Really struggling to find something substantive in that comment that might have justified the "Insightful" mod. You're sort of in the neighborhood of the Paradox of Tolerance, but not that it shows in your comment.
I think the consequences should be to your personal reputation, and the largest problem of the Internet is that there are too many people who don't care about their personal reputation or who feel no accountability for saying negative and destructive things. In the case of trolls, I'm not sure "people" is a meaningful label, since they can just spawn fresh sock puppets so quickly.
In terms of a constructive solution (which always seems lost and even laughable [a bid for "Funny" mods?] around today's Slashdot), I think the solution is to help the negative folks render themselves invisible. I think karma should be enhanced to be a kind of multidimensional metric of EPR (Earned Public Reputation). You would be able to control what sort of people are visible to you and who therefore can intrude into your attention and consume your time.
Personally speaking, I would like to set my visibility threshold a little above the default value. I think the default should be just slightly positive, which means that newbies would mostly be visible to each other, but they could quickly earn the normal level of visibility, perhaps merely by existing for a few weeks even if they don't earn any favorable mods. However by setting my own bar a little higher I would be able to focus on people who I'm more interested in. For example, I would like to favor people who earn funny mod points, even if a particular comment hasn't been so modded.
Facebook has a market cap over $500 billion. If there were NO expenses, that $40 billion in advertising revenue looks relatively small. I think I know what's wrong with this picture, but what's your explanation or hypothesis?
I'm trying to figure out the source of your handle... I'm remembering a funny comic on the Web about 15 years back. Any connection?
I wish I could share some of your optimism, but maybe I'm just jealous because what the Zuck has decided to implement is so much weaker than the EPR (Earned Public Reputation) that I've been advocating for a while now. In my fantasy, you should be able to see the data and even contest negative accusations. Also, I think any system involving REAL human beings has to be multidimensional.
I actually went over to Facebook to see if I could detect any trace of this system, but I couldn't. So let my go wild and speculate how I think it should work: You should see two adjacent icons for each identity. The first avatar would be self-selected and link to the usual profile generated by the self. The second avatar would be a standardized representation of the EPR of that identity. I usually imagine a little radar graph featuring the dimensions that are most important to you, the person who is looking at this mysterious new identity and trying to assess whether or not to read what it wrote or linked to. If you click on the EPR icon, the link would take you to the details, both of how each dimension was calculated and the actual data.
Also, I think the entire system should be biased in favor of positive reputation and the data should age over time. Easiest to illustrate with an example using the relatively simple dimension of "truthful", where the clear negative is "untruthful". If someone wanted to accuse someone of being untruthful, then they would have to document the lie, not merely point at it--and the reputation of the accuser should also be taken into account. If someone makes a false accusation, then that should bounce back against the accuser's own reputation. I think that most of this could actually be done automatically using algorithms, though I also think you still need ways to bring humans into the loop to resolve disputes--and I'm pert' shure Facebook would hate that part of the idea.
Good comment, and if I ever got a mod point to give you, then I would. However, I don't think your description of the financial model is accurate. While Facebook is deriving some revenue from advertising, I don't think the ad revenue is important. The important metric is market cap as driven by stock price. The Zuck suffers from the delusion that the insanely inflated stock price of Facebook shares can keep growing forever. After all, stock price is just a matter of opinion.
I said a bit more on the solution-side of the topic in my earlier comment on this story, but I should have explicitly stated that I don't think Facebook will EVER be part of any REAL solution. That's on a rational level, though on a gut level I continue to hope the corporate cancer can change its spots.
Glad to see that you got a mod point, though you could have done much more than reveal a tiny bit of insight. In Facebook's case, of course they can't stand the thought of letting us rate THEIR reputation--but they don't actually care because they are only concerned with one metric: Market Cap. On that foundation, there are several secondary metrics, of which time is the most important one. The more human time wasted on Facebook, the bigger the market cap. I think wasted time is bad, but Facebook INSISTS that bigger market cap is good.
There are solution approaches to the problems of bad actors (human and otherwise). I'm even an advocate of EPR (Earned Public Reputation), largely because I think it can be implemented in a symmetry way. However human reputation cannot and should not be reduced to a single number. Human beings are complex and trying to reduce that complexity to a single number is basically insane. A single number can only represent a single dimension, and the question becomes "What are they actually measuring?"
Amusingly enough, I recently submitted a proposal for a multidimensional metric for use on Wikipedia. As the idea mutated, it became two symmetric multidimensional metrics, one for contributors, and one for the articles that they contributed to. MEPR-C is proposed as the Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation of Contributors with the corresponding MEPR-A for articles. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Actually I read Stoll's book, and fairly recently, too. It fell off of the second search because the publication date was so old. The version I read was published in 1990.
I also considered including several books about international spying, especially histories related to the KGB in Russia and the CIA in America, but I ultimately decided against the ones I noticed for similar reasons. Adversarial spy-craft, yes, but computers were not much involved in the old days. However, the NSA has always been deep into computers, so I should have included The Shadow Factory by James Bamford, even though it's already become another oldie-but-goodie.
You surprised me. The one in my mind at that time was Cyber War by Richard Clarke. It's a bit older than I thought it was. Reviewing my records, I see Our Final Invention by James Barrat may include some relevant material and Wired for War by Peter Singer, which had more of a hardware focus. I didn't notice any others that I would recommend on this topic, though The Shallows by Nicholas Carr caught my eye, and I always feel that one is worthy of being recommended.
The story is not very well written. Should I cite the best book I've read on the topic? I bet no one cares within the context of today's Slashdot.
Anyway, the story is obviously about offensive capabilities, where the Chinese have lagged behind. Amusingly enough, a lot of that is because of the language problems, mostly the human languages, but also the computer languages, especially as related to the inaccessible source code. Right now it seems clear that the leaders in offense for cyber-war are the Russians.
On the defensive side, the Chinese are probably the leaders. They have the Great Firewall of China as a fairly serious line of defense and they think (and have always thought) in terms of partitioning and isolating and controlling their networks. Not just the computers, but the human networks, too. However it is probably more important that their society is less dependent upon computers and therefore less vulnerable to cyber-warfare attacks.
America is supposed to be one of the leaders in offensive capabilities, but the weaknesses on the defensive side are overwhelming. Almost no defenses and high vulnerability. Only tiny traces of defensive thinking.
I know you're being tongue in cheek and I might even give you the funny mod point if I ever got one to give, but you managed to hit another interesting note...
If I were a nosy and intrusive government agency with a FISA court to appeal to, I would go for a blanket warrant on this feature, starting with a less intrusive meta-information version. "We don't wont to look at their email yet, but we just want to know who is using this feature so we can check the names against our other lists to see if any of them merit special attention. By the way, we want the google to be required to keep copies of all of the confidential-mode email until we decide whether or not we need to see it. Think of the children and the terrorists!"
By the way, I'm just finishing the book Phishing and Countermeasures by Jakobsson and Myers. About 30 pages left out of 700, and largely concerned with email and the security thereof. And pretty much obsolete before the ink dried, but I needed some light summer reading. Why mention it? Partly for the cred claim, but upon reflection I think it's mostly to ask for a more up-to-date reference... I think you're still at the leading edge of these things, so...
Actually in the case of public figures, I'm still advocating for "celebrity" email. I think of it as a kind of mailbot for the dual of the spammer problem. Spam is a horde of fake senders with fake messages, whereas a public figure may face a horde of real people with real messages.
As it might work in your case, the incoming email would be parsed searching for obvious topics and even the sender's sentiments about those topics. That analysis would be bounced back to the sender as a webform for confirmation of the analysis (and to foil the spammers). What happens next should mostly be under the control of the public figure. For example, one option would be to focus on collecting summary statistics, while another public figure might want to make it easy to escalate the email to human attention. Obvious topics might be routed to FAQs or even Wikipedia.
I think it would be especially interesting to allow options for website publishing of the email. The idea would be to encourage people to share their email with each other based on their shared interest in the public figure and the topic of their email. Essentially leverage their relatively abundant time against each other to conserve the limited time of the public figure... It would also be natural to focus on escalating active discussions to the attention of the public figure.
However these are NOT the features you are looking for (in Gmail). And no one even asked about the tickler feature...
As one of one of the instigators of this discussion, I'm kind of disappointed... So let me try to summarize.
There seems to be an extremely strong consensus that confidential mode is a bad idea badly implemented. I would go farther and count it as more evidence of the increasing badness and evil of the google, but there wasn't much discussion along such lines and assigning the blame doesn't matter too much anyway. This is a bad feature that keeps rising from the grave like any good zombie.
I was unable to detect (in this discussion or anywhere else) any good reasons for this feature. Absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but if anyone does have a good reason for confidential mode email, then I hope you will share it. I'll continue searching the discussion (until it expires in a day or two), but obviously I'd be more likely to find your "good reason" if you reply to this comment...
My first suggested solution was a way to reject incoming confidential-mode email. Some people seem to agree that would be good, but no one (whose comments I found here on Slashdot) actually pointed at a way to do it or at a way to persuade the google to give us that option. I would also count it as a solution if someone knew of and told me about a full-featured email system with the option (and I even consider this feature bad enough to justify the large effort of leaving Gmail).
My second proposed solution is a sabotage pledge to subvert the intended confidentiality of any such email I do receive. Again, no local support, but now I wonder if it matters. I've realized that this feature may be doomed to disaster. Some people are going to take those obvious pictures of the confidential-mode email, and at some point the google is going to get dragged into a hefty lawsuit that may help the google realize the error of its ways. Kind of a shame that #PresidentTweety doesn't use Gmail, but I hope this feature persuades him to start. (Since the orange topic came up, I can't resist a link to this hilarious new music video and tribute to Aretha Franklin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...)
WOW. Are you the famous person with that name? Surprised to discover that I haven't read any of your books, but I'll check the local libraries now... (Too bad. Only one, and not in English.) (But I'm sure I've read some of your articles or stuff on the Web.)
Mostly reacting in surprise that you reject encrypted email, even though that is what I'm advocating (at least as a user option) for confidential-mode email. I actually think that people who want to send confidential-mode (or encrypted) email should be free to do so, but they should be subject to bounce messages from people who freely choose not to receive such messages.
Underneath the surface issue is the deeper topic of self-discreditation. For example, I think that by choosing anonymity the ACs discredit themselves and I count it as one of the better features of Slashdot that I can so easily render most of them invisible. If an AC troll wants to get a life and a name for that life, then they can at least start with neutral reputation. I'm interpreting your view of encryption as similar, but based on paranoia as the reason to lower their reputation. (In solution terms, I still think EPR (Earned Public Reputation) would be the best general approach.)
You again? I think I've already addressed some of your points in the longer reply above, but here I want to rehash the problem with the private email thing...
Most people do not want to spend the time required to setup and maintain their own email server. It's actually a different kind of network effect. I've already addressed (though it was in a reply not addressed to you) the network effect of more users, which is why Gmail seems valuable to the google in the first place. However the private email server is a kind of dual of the small network effect having high overhead.
And unless you configure your private email server to reject all confidential-mode email (or unless you take my pledge), then you're still vulnerable to what I perceive as the main threat of this sick and unwanted confidential-mode feature. Strangers can use it to try to ram their secrets down your throat.
If I ever got a mod point, I think I'd give you a funny for the typo. Or was it?
The problem with this confidential-mode service is NOT that I will never use it. The problem is that OTHER people will use it so they can accuse me of being a liar. If you can think of any legitimate use of confidential-mode email, then I'd be interested in hearing it. I think there are justifications for secrecy, but all of the legitimate ones (that I know of) go back to prior secrecy and I haven't found any pretense of justification in google's blather (or here on Slashdot).
The deeper topic barely touched by your comment, assuming that you meant "free", not "fee", is the network effect. The value of Gmail to the google is due to the number of users, which is why Gmail is "free" in a TANSTAAFL sense. However this confidential mode is such a bad feature that it really creates an opportunity for one of the other major players to attack the google by adding an anti-feature to their free email system.
If anyone knows an email system that has an option to REJECT all confidential-mode email, then please let me know about it. I would seriously consider moving my primary email off of Gmail to one of the lesser cancers such as Outlook or Apple. Will no one rid me of this meddlesome gmail?
Interesting that the only comments that so far have struck me as substantive are from the senior citizens. I've been searching for any HINT of a good reason for this new feature. You [jimbo] mentioned another of the bad "reasons", but there are LOTS of them. I already addressed your focus more substantively in my longer comment above, but I'm just going to repeat my proposed solution here:
If anyone EVER sends me a confidential-mode email, then the first thing I will do is take a picture of it. If the email is amusing enough, I will republish it in the most public and most embarrassing places I can find. Therefore, you should NEVER send me any confidential-mode email.
If enough people take similar pledges, then this feature will die the dog's death it deserves. Which is what led me to the realization that the spammers' are going to be the most enthusiastic abusers of confidential mode. (No insult intended to dogs, nor am I suggesting that they deserve bad deaths. It's just an idiom (and I wish I could think of a stronger one).)
Mostly wishing I had a mod point to give you [gweihir], but largely for your signature. So far most of the comments seem to be completely missing the point, make that ANY point, of the topic, but at least the confusion about email security is a real concern. I'm not sure I should confess to being the source of the quote at the top... That would make me largely liable for the misdirection of the discussion?
Let me try to clarify the distinction here. Private communication is fine. I don't think you can convince me that the entire world is entitled to know every communication between everyone (though that seems to be where email and smartphones are leading us because of legalized governmental intrusions). To secure those private communications, encryption is quite reasonable as one of the solutions.
This "confidential mode" thing is going farther. It is an attempt (which is already doomed to failure) to allow people to impose (fake) privacy on OTHER people. So far I am unable to imagine a legitimate purpose for this tool. The main goal is to support lies. "I never said that and the email that proves I said it no longer exists." That just led me to realize that spammers will probably be the most enthusiastic users of this mis-feature.
There is an obvious solution: I pledge to take an immediate screen shot of any confidential-mode email that I receive. If it's interesting enough, then I promise to publish that image in the most embarrassing and most public places I can find. If many people adopt similar pledges, then no one should EVER send me any confidential-mode email. Maybe it isn't too late to abort this sickness?
My initial reaction was I don't want it and I do not even want to receive it. I'm still reading this discussion to see if anyone can defend this feature. Hain't seen nothing yet.
I really think this is a big opportunity for one of the less evil players. If they offer me an email system where I can automatically reject all confidential-mode email, that might be a strong enough inducement to get me to abandon Gmail.
Now the larger question is about the dynamics of evil that have driven the google to ram this feature down our throats, but I'm going to reduce that part to "The google has become a corporate cancer dedicated to the worship of the false gawd profit." Your mileage may vary.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not enough of an engineer to be sure, but I think everything you say makes sense, especially about the guy wires. Given the limitations of my Japanese, it would take a lot of effort to find out if the new standards require them, though I rather think not.
I think the real problem in this specific case was broken economics. The turbine was already decommissioned and producing no value, but no one wanted to pay to take it down. Or perhaps you could say that the value of the salvaged materials was too low? The cost of the clean up when it collapsed was regarded as acceptable? Or was anyone thinking that far ahead?
As you noted, this wasn't a particularly strong typhoon. But we did have a bunch of them this year and I'm pretty sure it's strongly related to the record heat. As it affects the typhoons, the key data is the surface water temperature. As long as the typhoon is moving over water above a certain temperature, the typhoon tends to get stronger. Those sufficiently warm areas are getting larger each season... We actually had a period where 5 typhoons were spawned in 5 days.
Gee, the Internet was supposed to make communication so much easier. Turns out The Shallows was much too optimistic.
No mention in the story or the visible comments, but the story was covered on the news a couple of days ago. The construction standards were improved a few years after this turbine was built. Can't say it will never happen again, but the newer turbines are stronger.
The same typhoon also destroyed a lighthouse. Looked like a pretty tough one, and not that tall, either. This was basically a nasty typhoon.
Every Libertarian with whom I've had such a discussion has mostly convinced me that he doesn't actually understand his worship words. My sig is actually a kind of key, but I'll go ahead and include the longer version (but still somewhat constrained by Slashdot font restrictions):
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
I bet I could do at least 18 minutes TED-style on it, but I doubt you can figure out any of it. The typical Libertarian tends to get especially confused about the last term. Hint: There is no perfect knowledge.
I think you can advocate for a completely different form of capitalism if you stop with the money and start with the time. Every one-dimensional metric is dubious, but money is perhaps the most meaningless. In joke form, the bean counters know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Got me on the link, eh? Let's try that again:
[Several futile attempts to paste the link later...]
No can do. Anyway, the unlinkable [on Slashdot] article is a Wikipedia article about "What's that got to do with the..." I got there via some search like "with the price of tea".
Really hard to imagine what the "insightful" mod is for. Maybe the sig? Nothing in the story about "socialism", so that can't be it. Some sort of insight in attacking double-quoted scientists? Yeah, that's probably how Slashdot works now.
I think the real problem is that economists are too stupid and lazy. They focus on money because it's easy to count. "The light is better over here." These are not the solutions you're looking for, but you (that's y'all plus the economists) don't know where else to look.
When you rethink things in terms of time, the situation suddenly becomes much more clear. But is a Slashdot discussion worth the effort to rehash Ekronomics 101 yet one more time? I guess not. Yeah, it might lead towards a solution approach, but what's that got to do with the price of tea in China? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_that_got_to_do_with_the...%3F needs a Slashdot version?)
So how about the topic of pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation to help drive the solutions? It's surprisingly relevant if you're thinking about the problems from the time-based perspective. But again, it doesn't seem worth the effort here.
Interesting story. I wish the Slashdot discussion lived up to it, but so far I haven't found any trace. Usual searches, etc.
It would be nice to blame this opening post. Too bad it buries the actual insight, notwithstanding the typical first-post mod. The value and price of the ebook reflects supply and demand, but these are not the supplies and demands you are looking for.
The suckers... Er, Of course I mean the customers are paying extra for the convenience. Same as it ever was if you think about it wrong. (Searching on "convenience", I discovered a couple of relevant thoughts, but not moderated appropriately. Again the Slashdot moderation is failing to do its job.)
What is actually important is the TIME spent reading those books, and economists don't care because time is so hard to count compared to money. On one hand, we all live it and experience it exactly the same way. On the second hand, no one knows how much they really have. On the third hand, not all uses of time are equal in the pursuit of happiness, but on the fourth hand, we all value time quite highly. Lots more hands to go, but my main point is that the best new way to think about the economy that I've found involves putting the cart of money BEHIND the horse of time.
Now about that Capitalism without Capital book... Ah, I see a copy in a not so local library, but I can make the journey soon enough. I hate being an early adopter, but I'm happy to be an early rejecter of Amazon. Almost two decades of being Amazon-cancer free.
Other references? Most relevant one seems to be The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin. Or perhaps Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz?
*DING* That must mean it's time for Ekronomics 101 yet again, but I've about run out of the time I want to spend on this reply. If anyone is interested, I might continue later--hopefully within the strict time limits of stories on Slashdot.
If I ever got a mod point I'd probably give that one a funny, though there's an element of insight, too. Other aspects of the problems are too obvious for comment.
Instead, I'll just ask again for solution approaches. Obviously signed code from reliable sources is one, but I'd prefer to see the Google stop abusing everyone and start using some of the information in our favor. In the Android app case, that would involve sharing the financial information to help the potential victims recognize the probably crooks.
Really struggling to find something substantive in that comment that might have justified the "Insightful" mod. You're sort of in the neighborhood of the Paradox of Tolerance, but not that it shows in your comment.
I think the consequences should be to your personal reputation, and the largest problem of the Internet is that there are too many people who don't care about their personal reputation or who feel no accountability for saying negative and destructive things. In the case of trolls, I'm not sure "people" is a meaningful label, since they can just spawn fresh sock puppets so quickly.
In terms of a constructive solution (which always seems lost and even laughable [a bid for "Funny" mods?] around today's Slashdot), I think the solution is to help the negative folks render themselves invisible. I think karma should be enhanced to be a kind of multidimensional metric of EPR (Earned Public Reputation). You would be able to control what sort of people are visible to you and who therefore can intrude into your attention and consume your time.
Personally speaking, I would like to set my visibility threshold a little above the default value. I think the default should be just slightly positive, which means that newbies would mostly be visible to each other, but they could quickly earn the normal level of visibility, perhaps merely by existing for a few weeks even if they don't earn any favorable mods. However by setting my own bar a little higher I would be able to focus on people who I'm more interested in. For example, I would like to favor people who earn funny mod points, even if a particular comment hasn't been so modded.
Time's up. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Facebook has a market cap over $500 billion. If there were NO expenses, that $40 billion in advertising revenue looks relatively small. I think I know what's wrong with this picture, but what's your explanation or hypothesis?
I'm trying to figure out the source of your handle... I'm remembering a funny comic on the Web about 15 years back. Any connection?
I wish I could share some of your optimism, but maybe I'm just jealous because what the Zuck has decided to implement is so much weaker than the EPR (Earned Public Reputation) that I've been advocating for a while now. In my fantasy, you should be able to see the data and even contest negative accusations. Also, I think any system involving REAL human beings has to be multidimensional.
I actually went over to Facebook to see if I could detect any trace of this system, but I couldn't. So let my go wild and speculate how I think it should work: You should see two adjacent icons for each identity. The first avatar would be self-selected and link to the usual profile generated by the self. The second avatar would be a standardized representation of the EPR of that identity. I usually imagine a little radar graph featuring the dimensions that are most important to you, the person who is looking at this mysterious new identity and trying to assess whether or not to read what it wrote or linked to. If you click on the EPR icon, the link would take you to the details, both of how each dimension was calculated and the actual data.
Also, I think the entire system should be biased in favor of positive reputation and the data should age over time. Easiest to illustrate with an example using the relatively simple dimension of "truthful", where the clear negative is "untruthful". If someone wanted to accuse someone of being untruthful, then they would have to document the lie, not merely point at it--and the reputation of the accuser should also be taken into account. If someone makes a false accusation, then that should bounce back against the accuser's own reputation. I think that most of this could actually be done automatically using algorithms, though I also think you still need ways to bring humans into the loop to resolve disputes--and I'm pert' shure Facebook would hate that part of the idea.
Anyway, I started a related proposal over on Wikipedia: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik... ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Good comment, and if I ever got a mod point to give you, then I would. However, I don't think your description of the financial model is accurate. While Facebook is deriving some revenue from advertising, I don't think the ad revenue is important. The important metric is market cap as driven by stock price. The Zuck suffers from the delusion that the insanely inflated stock price of Facebook shares can keep growing forever. After all, stock price is just a matter of opinion.
I said a bit more on the solution-side of the topic in my earlier comment on this story, but I should have explicitly stated that I don't think Facebook will EVER be part of any REAL solution. That's on a rational level, though on a gut level I continue to hope the corporate cancer can change its spots.
Glad to see that you got a mod point, though you could have done much more than reveal a tiny bit of insight. In Facebook's case, of course they can't stand the thought of letting us rate THEIR reputation--but they don't actually care because they are only concerned with one metric: Market Cap. On that foundation, there are several secondary metrics, of which time is the most important one. The more human time wasted on Facebook, the bigger the market cap. I think wasted time is bad, but Facebook INSISTS that bigger market cap is good.
There are solution approaches to the problems of bad actors (human and otherwise). I'm even an advocate of EPR (Earned Public Reputation), largely because I think it can be implemented in a symmetry way. However human reputation cannot and should not be reduced to a single number. Human beings are complex and trying to reduce that complexity to a single number is basically insane. A single number can only represent a single dimension, and the question becomes "What are they actually measuring?"
Amusingly enough, I recently submitted a proposal for a multidimensional metric for use on Wikipedia. As the idea mutated, it became two symmetric multidimensional metrics, one for contributors, and one for the articles that they contributed to. MEPR-C is proposed as the Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation of Contributors with the corresponding MEPR-A for articles. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik...
Actually I read Stoll's book, and fairly recently, too. It fell off of the second search because the publication date was so old. The version I read was published in 1990.
I also considered including several books about international spying, especially histories related to the KGB in Russia and the CIA in America, but I ultimately decided against the ones I noticed for similar reasons. Adversarial spy-craft, yes, but computers were not much involved in the old days. However, the NSA has always been deep into computers, so I should have included The Shadow Factory by James Bamford, even though it's already become another oldie-but-goodie.
You surprised me. The one in my mind at that time was Cyber War by Richard Clarke. It's a bit older than I thought it was. Reviewing my records, I see Our Final Invention by James Barrat may include some relevant material and Wired for War by Peter Singer, which had more of a hardware focus. I didn't notice any others that I would recommend on this topic, though The Shallows by Nicholas Carr caught my eye, and I always feel that one is worthy of being recommended.
The story is not very well written. Should I cite the best book I've read on the topic? I bet no one cares within the context of today's Slashdot.
Anyway, the story is obviously about offensive capabilities, where the Chinese have lagged behind. Amusingly enough, a lot of that is because of the language problems, mostly the human languages, but also the computer languages, especially as related to the inaccessible source code. Right now it seems clear that the leaders in offense for cyber-war are the Russians.
On the defensive side, the Chinese are probably the leaders. They have the Great Firewall of China as a fairly serious line of defense and they think (and have always thought) in terms of partitioning and isolating and controlling their networks. Not just the computers, but the human networks, too. However it is probably more important that their society is less dependent upon computers and therefore less vulnerable to cyber-warfare attacks.
America is supposed to be one of the leaders in offensive capabilities, but the weaknesses on the defensive side are overwhelming. Almost no defenses and high vulnerability. Only tiny traces of defensive thinking.
I know you're being tongue in cheek and I might even give you the funny mod point if I ever got one to give, but you managed to hit another interesting note...
If I were a nosy and intrusive government agency with a FISA court to appeal to, I would go for a blanket warrant on this feature, starting with a less intrusive meta-information version. "We don't wont to look at their email yet, but we just want to know who is using this feature so we can check the names against our other lists to see if any of them merit special attention. By the way, we want the google to be required to keep copies of all of the confidential-mode email until we decide whether or not we need to see it. Think of the children and the terrorists!"
By the way, I'm just finishing the book Phishing and Countermeasures by Jakobsson and Myers. About 30 pages left out of 700, and largely concerned with email and the security thereof. And pretty much obsolete before the ink dried, but I needed some light summer reading. Why mention it? Partly for the cred claim, but upon reflection I think it's mostly to ask for a more up-to-date reference... I think you're still at the leading edge of these things, so...
How do you keep up?
Actually in the case of public figures, I'm still advocating for "celebrity" email. I think of it as a kind of mailbot for the dual of the spammer problem. Spam is a horde of fake senders with fake messages, whereas a public figure may face a horde of real people with real messages.
As it might work in your case, the incoming email would be parsed searching for obvious topics and even the sender's sentiments about those topics. That analysis would be bounced back to the sender as a webform for confirmation of the analysis (and to foil the spammers). What happens next should mostly be under the control of the public figure. For example, one option would be to focus on collecting summary statistics, while another public figure might want to make it easy to escalate the email to human attention. Obvious topics might be routed to FAQs or even Wikipedia.
I think it would be especially interesting to allow options for website publishing of the email. The idea would be to encourage people to share their email with each other based on their shared interest in the public figure and the topic of their email. Essentially leverage their relatively abundant time against each other to conserve the limited time of the public figure... It would also be natural to focus on escalating active discussions to the attention of the public figure.
However these are NOT the features you are looking for (in Gmail). And no one even asked about the tickler feature...
As one of one of the instigators of this discussion, I'm kind of disappointed... So let me try to summarize.
There seems to be an extremely strong consensus that confidential mode is a bad idea badly implemented. I would go farther and count it as more evidence of the increasing badness and evil of the google, but there wasn't much discussion along such lines and assigning the blame doesn't matter too much anyway. This is a bad feature that keeps rising from the grave like any good zombie.
I was unable to detect (in this discussion or anywhere else) any good reasons for this feature. Absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but if anyone does have a good reason for confidential mode email, then I hope you will share it. I'll continue searching the discussion (until it expires in a day or two), but obviously I'd be more likely to find your "good reason" if you reply to this comment...
My first suggested solution was a way to reject incoming confidential-mode email. Some people seem to agree that would be good, but no one (whose comments I found here on Slashdot) actually pointed at a way to do it or at a way to persuade the google to give us that option. I would also count it as a solution if someone knew of and told me about a full-featured email system with the option (and I even consider this feature bad enough to justify the large effort of leaving Gmail).
My second proposed solution is a sabotage pledge to subvert the intended confidentiality of any such email I do receive. Again, no local support, but now I wonder if it matters. I've realized that this feature may be doomed to disaster. Some people are going to take those obvious pictures of the confidential-mode email, and at some point the google is going to get dragged into a hefty lawsuit that may help the google realize the error of its ways. Kind of a shame that #PresidentTweety doesn't use Gmail, but I hope this feature persuades him to start. (Since the orange topic came up, I can't resist a link to this hilarious new music video and tribute to Aretha Franklin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...)
WOW. Are you the famous person with that name? Surprised to discover that I haven't read any of your books, but I'll check the local libraries now... (Too bad. Only one, and not in English.) (But I'm sure I've read some of your articles or stuff on the Web.)
Mostly reacting in surprise that you reject encrypted email, even though that is what I'm advocating (at least as a user option) for confidential-mode email. I actually think that people who want to send confidential-mode (or encrypted) email should be free to do so, but they should be subject to bounce messages from people who freely choose not to receive such messages.
Underneath the surface issue is the deeper topic of self-discreditation. For example, I think that by choosing anonymity the ACs discredit themselves and I count it as one of the better features of Slashdot that I can so easily render most of them invisible. If an AC troll wants to get a life and a name for that life, then they can at least start with neutral reputation. I'm interpreting your view of encryption as similar, but based on paranoia as the reason to lower their reputation. (In solution terms, I still think EPR (Earned Public Reputation) would be the best general approach.)
You again? I think I've already addressed some of your points in the longer reply above, but here I want to rehash the problem with the private email thing...
Most people do not want to spend the time required to setup and maintain their own email server. It's actually a different kind of network effect. I've already addressed (though it was in a reply not addressed to you) the network effect of more users, which is why Gmail seems valuable to the google in the first place. However the private email server is a kind of dual of the small network effect having high overhead.
And unless you configure your private email server to reject all confidential-mode email (or unless you take my pledge), then you're still vulnerable to what I perceive as the main threat of this sick and unwanted confidential-mode feature. Strangers can use it to try to ram their secrets down your throat.
If I ever got a mod point, I think I'd give you a funny for the typo. Or was it?
The problem with this confidential-mode service is NOT that I will never use it. The problem is that OTHER people will use it so they can accuse me of being a liar. If you can think of any legitimate use of confidential-mode email, then I'd be interested in hearing it. I think there are justifications for secrecy, but all of the legitimate ones (that I know of) go back to prior secrecy and I haven't found any pretense of justification in google's blather (or here on Slashdot).
The deeper topic barely touched by your comment, assuming that you meant "free", not "fee", is the network effect. The value of Gmail to the google is due to the number of users, which is why Gmail is "free" in a TANSTAAFL sense. However this confidential mode is such a bad feature that it really creates an opportunity for one of the other major players to attack the google by adding an anti-feature to their free email system.
If anyone knows an email system that has an option to REJECT all confidential-mode email, then please let me know about it. I would seriously consider moving my primary email off of Gmail to one of the lesser cancers such as Outlook or Apple. Will no one rid me of this meddlesome gmail?
Interesting that the only comments that so far have struck me as substantive are from the senior citizens. I've been searching for any HINT of a good reason for this new feature. You [jimbo] mentioned another of the bad "reasons", but there are LOTS of them. I already addressed your focus more substantively in my longer comment above, but I'm just going to repeat my proposed solution here:
If anyone EVER sends me a confidential-mode email, then the first thing I will do is take a picture of it. If the email is amusing enough, I will republish it in the most public and most embarrassing places I can find. Therefore, you should NEVER send me any confidential-mode email.
If enough people take similar pledges, then this feature will die the dog's death it deserves. Which is what led me to the realization that the spammers' are going to be the most enthusiastic abusers of confidential mode. (No insult intended to dogs, nor am I suggesting that they deserve bad deaths. It's just an idiom (and I wish I could think of a stronger one).)
Mostly wishing I had a mod point to give you [gweihir], but largely for your signature. So far most of the comments seem to be completely missing the point, make that ANY point, of the topic, but at least the confusion about email security is a real concern. I'm not sure I should confess to being the source of the quote at the top... That would make me largely liable for the misdirection of the discussion?
Let me try to clarify the distinction here. Private communication is fine. I don't think you can convince me that the entire world is entitled to know every communication between everyone (though that seems to be where email and smartphones are leading us because of legalized governmental intrusions). To secure those private communications, encryption is quite reasonable as one of the solutions.
This "confidential mode" thing is going farther. It is an attempt (which is already doomed to failure) to allow people to impose (fake) privacy on OTHER people. So far I am unable to imagine a legitimate purpose for this tool. The main goal is to support lies. "I never said that and the email that proves I said it no longer exists." That just led me to realize that spammers will probably be the most enthusiastic users of this mis-feature.
There is an obvious solution: I pledge to take an immediate screen shot of any confidential-mode email that I receive. If it's interesting enough, then I promise to publish that image in the most embarrassing and most public places I can find. If many people adopt similar pledges, then no one should EVER send me any confidential-mode email. Maybe it isn't too late to abort this sickness?
My initial reaction was I don't want it and I do not even want to receive it. I'm still reading this discussion to see if anyone can defend this feature. Hain't seen nothing yet.
I really think this is a big opportunity for one of the less evil players. If they offer me an email system where I can automatically reject all confidential-mode email, that might be a strong enough inducement to get me to abandon Gmail.
Now the larger question is about the dynamics of evil that have driven the google to ram this feature down our throats, but I'm going to reduce that part to "The google has become a corporate cancer dedicated to the worship of the false gawd profit." Your mileage may vary.