Trusting Microsoft to protect your data is asking for a disaster to happen. Take charge of your own data and store it offline somewhere. Do NOT use so-called 'cloud storage'. External drives aren't expensive anymore. Even an external SSD isn't that expensive. With all the high-speed external data interfaces at your disposal these days plus how cheap large external storage is there's really no excuse anymore for not keeping your important files offline on a device in your physical possession.
The Internet is, unfortunately, increasingly only good for selling people things, or at least trying to sell them things, and for spying on people's lives (mainly, so they can try to sell them things). Any other use that doesn't create a revenue stream ends up falling by the wayside. It gets more and more pedestrian every year.
Must be a random mistake, someone misspelled a name or something, because this is a white person, not a brown person. Everyone knows that the government of my United States hates brown people.</extreme_disgust>
Just wait until they're done with the brown (and darker people); they'll start divvying up the white people. Then everyone will see who and what the hell they voted for.
The Vegan 'philosophy' (if you can call it that) states that Vegans may not eat, own, or use anything with an even remotely animal origin. Therefore this vat-grown 'meat' cannot be Vegan: they had to get the DNA from an animal.
Here I expected the story to detail how they analyzed the network traffic and devised a MitM attack to trick the machine into thinking it was getting paid, or discovering an administrative backdoor they managed to crack the root password for, or 3:00am hacking into the firmware through a JTAG connection, decompilation of the firmware, then substituting doctored firmware to enable a secret button-press sequence to enable all selections to be $0.00.. but no! They disconnected a network cable! BORING! I don't think they got fired for stealing from vending machines. I think they got fired for lack of creativity!
Because of this I use the approach above, though I'll wager neither is all that great at real bulletproof privacy.
I have a close friend who does that. Problem is, no matter how careful you are, you let a word or two slip here and there. They can even glean quite a bit about your personality even from how you write things, what your sense of humor is like, and so on. I don't use any social media anymore, and I don't use my real name online. I know damned well that corporations and the government still have data on me because aside from going completely dark (no internet, no phone, pay cash for everything, etc) I still 'leak' some data. But I'll be damned if I'm going to give it away freely.
I don't think that's a new play invented by the CIA, I think that's a really old one out of a very old playbook: claim anyone who disagrees with you is insane. It's just another form of devaluing and discrediting someone, which is a much more effective strategy than killing them outright; you discredit someone thoroughly enough, they'll never recover from it. You kill someone, you create a martyr, and you can't hurt a martyr, you can only make them stronger.
If people don't regularly raise a stink about enchroachment upon liberties, they irrevocably vanish.
Smartphones. The Media. Television. Movies. Social media. Professional sports. There are probably other things that should go on this list, but they're all 'Bread and Circuses', 21st Century Edition. They're distracting the vast majority of people from actually paying attention. Then there's the religion angle: keep the Faithful more concerned about the Afterlife than THIS life -- and more afraid of what the Other Religions want to 'do' to you, than what's going on with your own government. The so-called 'war on terror': People who are KEPT in a constant state of terror, have their higher reasoning abilities essentially shut off; they'll turn to whoever it is that says they can 'save them', and will agree to almost anything (i.e., trading your actual freedom for a false sense of security). It's a battle, but it's an uphill battle.
*SHRUG* I don't know what to say, then. Seems like I see/read/hear dumber and dumber things all the time, the last 10-20 years. Then there's what I'm perceiving as people getting lazier, and technology being the enabler to them getting lazier. They're getting fatter and weaker, too.
Some of us do, and what do we get for our attention and trouble? We get labeled 'conspiracy theorists', or maybe 'luddites', or maybe 'potential terrorist/criminal' ("what do you have to hide, CItizen?"). Meanwhile idiots gobble up so-called 'social media' like it's candy, post their entire lives on it, and give you the stink-eye when you try to tell them that their right to privacy is valuable, and that they're just giving it away to corporations and governments that don't give a flying fuck about them as human beings, just as revenue sources, or as 'work units', or whatever governments think of people as. We're already living in a country (U.S.) where people are voluntarily purchasing with their own money technologies that can and are used to spy and surveil them 24/7/365 (smartphones, 'smart' TVs, Amazon Alexa and similar, game consoles with built-in cameras and microphones that require always-on internet connectivity, 'Iot' devices like Nest, so-called 'fitness bands', and so on) and are having some innocuous technologies forced on them ('smart' utility meters, which of themselves are not evil, but the immediacy of the data collection can be used to feed into profiles of people; when they're home, what they might be doing, etc; traffic monitoring cameras everywhere you look, etc). ISPs collecting data on everything you do on the Internet (even though they have to be lying when they say they aren't doing it, 24/7/365) and so on. Then there's so-called 'self driving cars', of which Google would love to see a world where no one is allowed to drive themselves, and the car has no controls whatsoever for a human occupant anyway, so you have ZERO CONTROL over the vehicle; of course it's got cameras and microphones inside it to monitor you, and GPS, and it can be remotely controlled by law enforcement, the government, and of course any criminals with the technical chops to hack into it and seize control of the car's systems. THIS IS THE WORLD WE'RE ALREADY LIVING IN, AND NOBODY IS REALLY COMPLAINING YET. If you do complain, as previously stated, most people look at you like you're nuts.
There will be a sharp drop-off at some point. Something will go too far, and it'll be the thing that finally gets people to wake up. Sadly, it'll probably be when the government(s) decide to openly treat citizens like convicts in a prison, with no freedom to speak of, and full knowledge that you're monitored and judged 24/7/365 everywhere you go, whatever you're doing. China and it's assholery anti-human policies is just the foreshadowing of what's to come. No government ever cedes power back to the citizens; power always seeks more power. There is a small chance that enough people like you and I are paying attention and speaking up, so that everyone else will be aware enough to avoid this sort of extreme dystopian future, but at the moment it's looking rather slim. It might take it being too late and there having to be an uprising. Or perhaps it's all really coming on too slow and subtle, and no one will notice until it's way too late to stop it. Or, even worse: it'll happen, and everyone will have been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that they'll think it's good and right and normal.
I'm actually glad I probably won't live long enough to see it all happen, and even gladder that I don't believe in an afterlife or reincarnation. I don't want to see what happens afterwards.:-(
..but on the other hand: I hear rumblings of Chinese citizenry getting good and bloody well tired of Communist Chinese government bullshit. Wouldn't be the first time in China's history, or the last I suspect, that there was an Uprising and a Revolution of one kind or another. You don't want to piss off a BILLION people, now do you? They could kill 500,000,000 of them in a civil war and still lose. *shrug* you never know, human rights and democracy might win out in the end. Despite all my gloom-and-doom, there is always a spark of hope left.. We might have a Star Trek future yet..
Perhaps what I should be thinking is: "Dumb people are getting dumber, and smart people are getting smarter, and the contrast between the two is becoming greater in the process". Perhaps it's like certain types of crime; it appeared, at some point, that crimes like child molesting increased, but what really happened is it was being detected and reported much more than it used to, giving the surface appearance of increasing.
I'm not him, and I'm not going to bother doing that research, but I can say that it's hard to get elected to public office in these United States unless you're a 'good Christian' or at least can fake it well.
They'll either claim that it's a bunch of lies created by Satan-loving 'scientists', or that the alien life itself is of Satan, inherently evil, and exists only to sway the Faithful; religious leaders will tell the Faithful to ignore it all and 'stay stong in their Faith, believe the Word of God, blah blah blah' and so on. You could have sentient, technologically advanced, interstellar aliens land on Earth in their starship, and they'd declare them False and Evil and Of Satan. You'd have religious nutjobs trying to kill the Evil Satanic Aliens who obviously have come to turn Man away from their kind and loving God (whichever one it is) and destroy us all. You could even have aliens land on Earth, and be converted to Islam or Catholicism or *whatever*, and it wouldn't be good enough, they'd still be declared Anathema and targeted for destruction. And then, after some fanatical lunatic kills them, their civilization declares war on the Earth and Mankind for their crime, which of course justifies everything the religious nutjobs have been saying up to that point, and we all get annihilated when they bombard us from orbit. Haven't you been paying attention? Cautionary tales like this have been written more times than I can count.
Aside from not owning or wanting a smartphone myself for a whole list of reasons, I've been saying that they're just making people dumber. Now someone has proof.:-)
Hello, fellow Filthy Common Citizen here..:-)
The last two weeks I started carrying cash again to pay for most day-to-day things, weekly groceries, fuel, etc.; so far so good. I may even go back to mailing checks for bills, although I know damned well that they're scanned and processed electronically these days, so likely no more secure than paying online. I really don't want to have to go all the way to showing up at offices during business hours and paying cash for my monthly utility bills, though, that would be a gigantic pain. The EFT Exit Strategy is being formulated as I go. Aside from the retarded politicians and power-hungry LEOs wanting to snoop into everything, there's also the rampant hacking of just about everything. I'm predicting it getting much worse before it starts getting better, and in the meantime if people aren't careful they'll get their entire lives stolen from them. I don't want to be one of them.
So long as there are backup failsafe safety systems in place comparable or better than conventional elevators, sounds good to me. Also, please make the control system as unhackable as possible, and make the at least some of the safety systems completely separate from the main control system, so if it is hacked, they can't use the elevators as murder weapons/weapons of mass destruction? Thanks.
You're totally and 100% correct. Also, anyone who watches any number of TV shows knows this one: Book encryption. Unless you know what book(s) are being used, you'll never decrypt the message being sent. Anyone can use it, doesn't require a computer, doesn't even require a high IQ to implement, and it's highly effective. This is just one example of ways around a world without digital encryption or with compromised encryption, there are many more I'm sure. What these morons want is stupid and pointless and I am at a complete loss to understand how any number of experts that they must trust enough to consult haven't managed to get it through their apparently thick skulls that what they want is inviting disaster and will not accomplish anything more than disaster.
I agree with you, except you're not aware of how this would actually work: The politicians (and the rich, of course) would be allowed to use totally unbreakable encryption to protect themselves. It's us filthy common citizens who would have to go back to paying cash and mailing paper checks for things, or risk having our lives ruined by criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
Trusting Microsoft to protect your data is asking for a disaster to happen. Take charge of your own data and store it offline somewhere. Do NOT use so-called 'cloud storage'. External drives aren't expensive anymore. Even an external SSD isn't that expensive. With all the high-speed external data interfaces at your disposal these days plus how cheap large external storage is there's really no excuse anymore for not keeping your important files offline on a device in your physical possession.
..so how is it really any worse if they compromise the 'user experience', too?
Is that supposed to make it all less shitty somehow? i don't think it's working!
The Internet is, unfortunately, increasingly only good for selling people things, or at least trying to sell them things, and for spying on people's lives (mainly, so they can try to sell them things). Any other use that doesn't create a revenue stream ends up falling by the wayside. It gets more and more pedestrian every year.
Must be a random mistake, someone misspelled a name or something, because this is a white person, not a brown person.
Everyone knows that the government of my United States hates brown people.</extreme_disgust>
Just wait until they're done with the brown (and darker people); they'll start divvying up the white people. Then everyone will see who and what the hell they voted for.
Humans! They ruin everything!
The Vegan 'philosophy' (if you can call it that) states that Vegans may not eat, own, or use anything with an even remotely animal origin. Therefore this vat-grown 'meat' cannot be Vegan: they had to get the DNA from an animal.
'Before' what, precisely? What are they planning? X-)
Here I expected the story to detail how they analyzed the network traffic and devised a MitM attack to trick the machine into thinking it was getting paid, or discovering an administrative backdoor they managed to crack the root password for, or 3:00am hacking into the firmware through a JTAG connection, decompilation of the firmware, then substituting doctored firmware to enable a secret button-press sequence to enable all selections to be $0.00.. but no! They disconnected a network cable! BORING! I don't think they got fired for stealing from vending machines. I think they got fired for lack of creativity!
Trump is an anomaly, in more ways than just this.
Because of this I use the approach above, though I'll wager neither is all that great at real bulletproof privacy.
I have a close friend who does that. Problem is, no matter how careful you are, you let a word or two slip here and there. They can even glean quite a bit about your personality even from how you write things, what your sense of humor is like, and so on. I don't use any social media anymore, and I don't use my real name online. I know damned well that corporations and the government still have data on me because aside from going completely dark (no internet, no phone, pay cash for everything, etc) I still 'leak' some data. But I'll be damned if I'm going to give it away freely.
I don't think that's a new play invented by the CIA, I think that's a really old one out of a very old playbook: claim anyone who disagrees with you is insane. It's just another form of devaluing and discrediting someone, which is a much more effective strategy than killing them outright; you discredit someone thoroughly enough, they'll never recover from it. You kill someone, you create a martyr, and you can't hurt a martyr, you can only make them stronger.
If people don't regularly raise a stink about enchroachment upon liberties, they irrevocably vanish.
Smartphones. The Media. Television. Movies. Social media. Professional sports. There are probably other things that should go on this list, but they're all 'Bread and Circuses', 21st Century Edition. They're distracting the vast majority of people from actually paying attention. Then there's the religion angle: keep the Faithful more concerned about the Afterlife than THIS life -- and more afraid of what the Other Religions want to 'do' to you, than what's going on with your own government. The so-called 'war on terror': People who are KEPT in a constant state of terror, have their higher reasoning abilities essentially shut off; they'll turn to whoever it is that says they can 'save them', and will agree to almost anything (i.e., trading your actual freedom for a false sense of security). It's a battle, but it's an uphill battle.
*SHRUG* I don't know what to say, then. Seems like I see/read/hear dumber and dumber things all the time, the last 10-20 years. Then there's what I'm perceiving as people getting lazier, and technology being the enabler to them getting lazier. They're getting fatter and weaker, too.
Some of us do, and what do we get for our attention and trouble? We get labeled 'conspiracy theorists', or maybe 'luddites', or maybe 'potential terrorist/criminal' ("what do you have to hide, CItizen?"). Meanwhile idiots gobble up so-called 'social media' like it's candy, post their entire lives on it, and give you the stink-eye when you try to tell them that their right to privacy is valuable, and that they're just giving it away to corporations and governments that don't give a flying fuck about them as human beings, just as revenue sources, or as 'work units', or whatever governments think of people as. We're already living in a country (U.S.) where people are voluntarily purchasing with their own money technologies that can and are used to spy and surveil them 24/7/365 (smartphones, 'smart' TVs, Amazon Alexa and similar, game consoles with built-in cameras and microphones that require always-on internet connectivity, 'Iot' devices like Nest, so-called 'fitness bands', and so on) and are having some innocuous technologies forced on them ('smart' utility meters, which of themselves are not evil, but the immediacy of the data collection can be used to feed into profiles of people; when they're home, what they might be doing, etc; traffic monitoring cameras everywhere you look, etc). ISPs collecting data on everything you do on the Internet (even though they have to be lying when they say they aren't doing it, 24/7/365) and so on. Then there's so-called 'self driving cars', of which Google would love to see a world where no one is allowed to drive themselves, and the car has no controls whatsoever for a human occupant anyway, so you have ZERO CONTROL over the vehicle; of course it's got cameras and microphones inside it to monitor you, and GPS, and it can be remotely controlled by law enforcement, the government, and of course any criminals with the technical chops to hack into it and seize control of the car's systems. THIS IS THE WORLD WE'RE ALREADY LIVING IN, AND NOBODY IS REALLY COMPLAINING YET. If you do complain, as previously stated, most people look at you like you're nuts.
:-(
..but on the other hand: I hear rumblings of Chinese citizenry getting good and bloody well tired of Communist Chinese government bullshit. Wouldn't be the first time in China's history, or the last I suspect, that there was an Uprising and a Revolution of one kind or another. You don't want to piss off a BILLION people, now do you? They could kill 500,000,000 of them in a civil war and still lose. *shrug* you never know, human rights and democracy might win out in the end. Despite all my gloom-and-doom, there is always a spark of hope left.. We might have a Star Trek future yet..
There will be a sharp drop-off at some point. Something will go too far, and it'll be the thing that finally gets people to wake up. Sadly, it'll probably be when the government(s) decide to openly treat citizens like convicts in a prison, with no freedom to speak of, and full knowledge that you're monitored and judged 24/7/365 everywhere you go, whatever you're doing. China and it's assholery anti-human policies is just the foreshadowing of what's to come. No government ever cedes power back to the citizens; power always seeks more power. There is a small chance that enough people like you and I are paying attention and speaking up, so that everyone else will be aware enough to avoid this sort of extreme dystopian future, but at the moment it's looking rather slim. It might take it being too late and there having to be an uprising. Or perhaps it's all really coming on too slow and subtle, and no one will notice until it's way too late to stop it. Or, even worse: it'll happen, and everyone will have been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that they'll think it's good and right and normal.
I'm actually glad I probably won't live long enough to see it all happen, and even gladder that I don't believe in an afterlife or reincarnation. I don't want to see what happens afterwards.
Perhaps what I should be thinking is: "Dumb people are getting dumber, and smart people are getting smarter, and the contrast between the two is becoming greater in the process". Perhaps it's like certain types of crime; it appeared, at some point, that crimes like child molesting increased, but what really happened is it was being detected and reported much more than it used to, giving the surface appearance of increasing.
1. I'm partly being funny.
2. It's plausible.
3. Are you going to argue to me that people don't seem to be getting dumber?
I'm not him, and I'm not going to bother doing that research, but I can say that it's hard to get elected to public office in these United States unless you're a 'good Christian' or at least can fake it well.
They'll either claim that it's a bunch of lies created by Satan-loving 'scientists', or that the alien life itself is of Satan, inherently evil, and exists only to sway the Faithful; religious leaders will tell the Faithful to ignore it all and 'stay stong in their Faith, believe the Word of God, blah blah blah' and so on. You could have sentient, technologically advanced, interstellar aliens land on Earth in their starship, and they'd declare them False and Evil and Of Satan. You'd have religious nutjobs trying to kill the Evil Satanic Aliens who obviously have come to turn Man away from their kind and loving God (whichever one it is) and destroy us all. You could even have aliens land on Earth, and be converted to Islam or Catholicism or *whatever*, and it wouldn't be good enough, they'd still be declared Anathema and targeted for destruction. And then, after some fanatical lunatic kills them, their civilization declares war on the Earth and Mankind for their crime, which of course justifies everything the religious nutjobs have been saying up to that point, and we all get annihilated when they bombard us from orbit. Haven't you been paying attention? Cautionary tales like this have been written more times than I can count.
Aside from not owning or wanting a smartphone myself for a whole list of reasons, I've been saying that they're just making people dumber. Now someone has proof. :-)
Hello, fellow Filthy Common Citizen here.. :-)
The last two weeks I started carrying cash again to pay for most day-to-day things, weekly groceries, fuel, etc.; so far so good. I may even go back to mailing checks for bills, although I know damned well that they're scanned and processed electronically these days, so likely no more secure than paying online. I really don't want to have to go all the way to showing up at offices during business hours and paying cash for my monthly utility bills, though, that would be a gigantic pain. The EFT Exit Strategy is being formulated as I go. Aside from the retarded politicians and power-hungry LEOs wanting to snoop into everything, there's also the rampant hacking of just about everything. I'm predicting it getting much worse before it starts getting better, and in the meantime if people aren't careful they'll get their entire lives stolen from them. I don't want to be one of them.
You're REALLY hard to follow. Are you saying this is all about something as mundane and pedestrian as money? If so that's even worse than I thought.
So long as there are backup failsafe safety systems in place comparable or better than conventional elevators, sounds good to me. Also, please make the control system as unhackable as possible, and make the at least some of the safety systems completely separate from the main control system, so if it is hacked, they can't use the elevators as murder weapons/weapons of mass destruction? Thanks.
This makes me happy. :-)
You're totally and 100% correct. Also, anyone who watches any number of TV shows knows this one: Book encryption. Unless you know what book(s) are being used, you'll never decrypt the message being sent. Anyone can use it, doesn't require a computer, doesn't even require a high IQ to implement, and it's highly effective. This is just one example of ways around a world without digital encryption or with compromised encryption, there are many more I'm sure. What these morons want is stupid and pointless and I am at a complete loss to understand how any number of experts that they must trust enough to consult haven't managed to get it through their apparently thick skulls that what they want is inviting disaster and will not accomplish anything more than disaster.
I agree with you, except you're not aware of how this would actually work: The politicians (and the rich, of course) would be allowed to use totally unbreakable encryption to protect themselves. It's us filthy common citizens who would have to go back to paying cash and mailing paper checks for things, or risk having our lives ruined by criminals.