Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately.
I doubt that ancient rulers cared much (if at all) about their “legacy”. Ancient artifacts and monuments were produced for many reasons: religious, political, practical, artistic, etc., all of which had relevance in their present. Concerns about the future mostly had to do with the afterworld. What we find today by chance is not because of smart planning by our elders, it is because we still have smart people who find the study of our past valuable and enlightening.
As for those who are trying today to concoct some “legacy”, they are pompous, vain and clueless fools. They have no idea what will survive (or how long), what will be found, what will be judged valuable and significant. They’d sure love to make decisions for the rest of humanity. And, hey! Shooting a CD into space is a lot easier than achieving something actually so useful to humanity that it would be remembered for many ages.
Or, may be they are not really fools and, like a few rulers of the past, the “legacy” stuff they make is merely there to impress their contemporaries. In short, yes, just more bloody advertising.
...saying on the project's website that the clock is "designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking."
Buried deep in a west Texas mountain...
A symbol, an icon... is rarely an whimsical or esoteric device buried deep in a mountain. Instead, it’s typically an artifact of current culture, usually intended to perform some useful (possibly artistic) function, built in a public location where it ends up being a visible reminder of something intuitively meaningful to many.
This... is at best a symptom of megalomaniac arrogance, inequality and waste that will be soon forgotten after a fleeting time of shallow fame.
After a year that saw over $300 million in damages from hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters...
Well, with a track record like that, they clearly had it coming, didn’t they? Those firings ought to teach the remaining staff a lesson! Make the weather great again!
Interesting, thanks! I understand the business rationale, and I can also imagine the difficulty to share methods that could reveal too much about one’s infrastructure, or could be too specific to an architecture to be broadly applicable to others. At the same time, as an outsider, I find it striking that mistakes seem to be endlessly repeated (by different entities) and I also imagine that those mistakes have the potential to fragilise not merely those who make them but to also spread to partners, suppliers and customers. In most fields, methods eventually mature and propagate as specialists move from one company to another; in this field, though, with new technologies and new threats seemingly appearing every week, I am not expecting spontaneous maturation to have much impact. On the positive side for security experts, that makes them all the more valuable!
Facebook 'Likes' Are a Powerful Tool For Authoritarian Rulers
...Facebook, (...) whom he accuses of falsely inflating his popularity through purchased "likes" and spreading fake news.
Well, Facebook is designed to be just that: a paid propaganda conduit enabling corporate customers (you know, the ones who actually pay Facebook) to get their kool-aid into the heads of billions of unwitting consumers. What else would motivate them to collectively pour billions of dollars into a service like Facebook? Follow us on Facebook, little people! Hammer your brain with our name, make it look like we’re the most popular and let us see everything about you, all in a single click!
And why think that politicians wouldn’t do the exact same thing when they regularly employ the same marketing agencies and the same mass propaganda techniques as commercial entities?
We spend as much on testing our security as we do on the security.
Not being in that field, I’m curious: does your company share (both as provider and recipient) methodology information (security best practices, etc.) with others in the financial sector (or with an even wider audience) or is it something that is considered somewhat secret (competitive advantage, etc.)?
Here’s a hypothesis (with apologies if it’s dumb or obvious): screen time is somewhat addictive; perhaps not formally so, but let’s say that on-screen content (games, online social interaction, news reading, etc.) can be so engaging that it’s harder to put down than a book and, unlike a book or a book chapter, often lacks a well-defined “end”. This leads regular consumers of online content to cut down on sleep time (possibly with an even greater impact on teenagers and children who need more sleep than adults). Screen time may also affect the quality of sleep (studies have been done about that, I believe). Over time, this lack or low quality of sleep durably disturbs brain functions and triggers depression, cognitive problems, etc. In other words, it might not be the content (or the medium) itself that’s the problem, but lack of quality sleep.
In spite of it being perhaps more difficult to exploit, I have the impression that large data centres operating virtual private servers (commercial and corporate alike) have good reasons to be seriously concerned about Spectre.
Citing Forbes, Wikipedia’s article on Spectre says: “Spectre has the potential of having a greater impact on cloud providers than Meltdown. Whereas Meltdown allows unauthorized applications to read from privileged memory to obtain sensitive data from processes running on the same cloud server, Spectre can allow malicious programs to induce a hypervisor to transmit the data to a guest system running on top of it.”
By contrast, Wikipedia’s article on Meltdown says: “Meltdown attack cannot be used to break out of a virtual machine.” (Of course, Meltdown is nonetheless a critical problem, for other reasons.)
Have a look at Wikipedia’s article on rail transport; particularly, in the “history” chapter, the parts about electric and diesel locomotives. It might sway your opinion a bit. There’s been plenty of innovation and research in the railway industry, and I find it rather interesting that its early adoption of the electric motor (beginning with the 1890 underground line in London) was largely spurred by environmental concerns.
Oh my god Oh my god Oh my god!!! They managed to get a photo of the secret password that was written on the super-secret Post-It-Note that was secretly affixed on the front of the terminal of our hyper-ultra-secret nuclear-threat-preparedness system! We’re soooooo totally screwed now!
I’m really not fond of her interviewing style. I find that, like many seasoned journalists, she rarely lets her guests develop their thoughts for more than a few seconds, interrupting them and then speaking as much (if not more) than them. She has the irritating tendency to feed words to her guests (at least, those who are less comfortable speaking than her), starting a line of thought for them (as in “It must have felt so blah blah such and such. How did you feel when blah blah blah?”) and getting them to just repeat and complete the line, and so basically making them say something that they likely would not have quite said on their own. She may be confusing that technique with “getting them to open up” but, in reality, the result feels about as valuable as a forced police confession.
It’s a pity, given that her shows are pre-recorded and edited, giving her the opportunity to let guests take as much time as they’d like to precisely formulate their thoughts.
The explanation is more orthodox than some of the alternatives offered...
Unfortunately, no matter how extraordinary, scientific observations rarely (if ever) accommodate exciting far-fetched theories, leading disaffected audiences back to television...
Michael Gruhn’s report on the vulnerability (linked in the article) has more information and is more understandable (to me) than the article itself.
Choice excerpts:
“An unauthorized third party can access: the location, model/type name, serial number (i.e. IMEI), assigned phone number, custom assigned name... of all location tracking devices managed by a vulnerable online service.”
“An unauthorized third party can: access the location history; send commands; activate and/or deactivate geo fencing alarm... [for] all location tracking devices managed by a vulnerable online service.”
“If you use an OBD GPS tracker that allows to immobilize your car and it is managed via a vulnerable online service we urge you to immediately detach it from your car and stop using it.”
Naturally, there are still things that matter and are worth being concerned about. For example, if poverty became so rampant that social unrest erupted, the economy tanked, banks failed, savings were wiped out, crime exploded, and war eventually broke out... all of a sudden, the prospect of sleeping late, followed by a leisurely brunch and a hike with the dog... might not sound so realistic or even so appealing any more.
Don’t get me wrong: you’re quite right to also enjoy the day and savour the fruits of your past efforts! I only mean to say that, regardless of our age and situation, there are things that really matter and they tend to be the same things. So the problem might not be so much that young people worry excessively about frivolous stuff (though they sure face a lot of pressure to do so, now mostly coming not from nature but from commercial concerns, whose influence I wish could be curbed); rather, it may be that they worry too little about stuff that really matters.
When freed from petty concerns, older generations might be in the position to help their successors pay some serious attention to important issues, ensuring that the insignificant does not displace the significant in younger people’s minds. And it won’t be enough to preach that such and such doesn’t really matter much, son! (That would be roundly rejected.) Instead, through personal engagement, leading by example, affirming and explaining “here is some of the stuff that I believe really matters, and let me tell you why I believe so...”
When personal computing started, it was largely run by enthusiasts who envisioned how liberating it could be. Of course, it soon became a booming business run by the usual people, guided by the usual (lack of) ethics and entirely focused on profit (and therefore, consumer control). Later, people thought that Internet could render obsolete traditional tightly-controlled advertiser-directed media like television. Well, what do we now have? And is that the fault of software and programmers? Programmers are employees, and they do as they’re told. I doubt anyone grew up dreaming: “When I’m grown-up, I’ll be a DRM or spyware software developer!”
What is much more stunning is the herd mentality exhibited by the public, mindlessly embracing technology of really dubious benefit yet with very obvious drawbacks in terms of personal freedom. Are consumers ever stopping to wonder: “Wait a minute, what’d happen with this product if...?” No, instead, the mood is “Shut up and take my money!”
Is that the fault of software? Or is it our collective fault? And if children are trained to be dumb consumers, is it the fault of the device we place into their hands, the malicious applications that we let them use and the dumb content that we make available to them through those devices? Or is it the fault of their educators (that’s us) who deprive them from meaningful conversations about serious topics, and the chance to develop the ability to think deeply, have an educated, polite and fruitful conversation, cultivate intellectual curiosity and doubts, enhance their awareness of the real world around them, and treasure human values like charity?
Blaming software would be like blaming food, and the abundance of food. Yup, most of us are obese and sick. No, it’s not the fault of farmers or produce. We need to look in the mirror and begin to honestly appraise the fundamentals of how we live (and want to live) as individuals and operate as a society.
Thanks for setting the tone for the new year. That’s the way policy and civil discourse are to be conducted from now on, isn’t it?
Person #1: “I have this idea/theory/observation. What do you guys think?”
Person #2 to everybody else: “Folks, move along, nothing to see here. That guy is an asshole and you all know it. Ignore him!”
There is no need for you, the operator, to be “certified”. The TLS certificate installed on your server merely increases the odds (for your users) that the machine serving the content (your server) is really the one that they expected (rather than a server operated by a malicious operator) and that the content received is really the content that was sent by that machine (rather than fake content fraudulently injected during transit by a malicious actor). It’s rather sensible to promote secure connections, and it does promote freedom by ensuring that web operators can serve their data without interference (from criminals, propagandists, etc.), and by enabling web users to trust that what they’re reading really came from who they think is serving it.
True, secure connections over HTTP require the server to have a valid certificate. So EFF and others have created a TLS certificate delivery system that is free, anonymous, automated and non-intrusive. It requires a little extra setup work on the part of the webmaster but, other than that, what great problems do you see with that scheme?
HTTPS prevents tampering with the connection. Even if nobody cares about your family pictures, someone cares about the opportunity that you give them to modify the content sent by your server before it reaches your relatives, do some social engineering at their expense (they’ll be convinced that whatever they see comes from trusted you) and get them to fall for a phishing trap or install malware. By serving through HTTPS, you are adding some protection for your relatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately.
I doubt that ancient rulers cared much (if at all) about their “legacy”. Ancient artifacts and monuments were produced for many reasons: religious, political, practical, artistic, etc., all of which had relevance in their present. Concerns about the future mostly had to do with the afterworld. What we find today by chance is not because of smart planning by our elders, it is because we still have smart people who find the study of our past valuable and enlightening.
As for those who are trying today to concoct some “legacy”, they are pompous, vain and clueless fools. They have no idea what will survive (or how long), what will be found, what will be judged valuable and significant. They’d sure love to make decisions for the rest of humanity. And, hey! Shooting a CD into space is a lot easier than achieving something actually so useful to humanity that it would be remembered for many ages.
Or, may be they are not really fools and, like a few rulers of the past, the “legacy” stuff they make is merely there to impress their contemporaries. In short, yes, just more bloody advertising.
I can completely believe that not being able to get code reviews could lead to performance problems.
If developers can routinely be penalised because of circumstances entirely out of their control, the company has serious management issues to resolve!
...saying on the project's website that the clock is "designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking."
Buried deep in a west Texas mountain...
A symbol, an icon... is rarely an whimsical or esoteric device buried deep in a mountain. Instead, it’s typically an artifact of current culture, usually intended to perform some useful (possibly artistic) function, built in a public location where it ends up being a visible reminder of something intuitively meaningful to many.
This... is at best a symptom of megalomaniac arrogance, inequality and waste that will be soon forgotten after a fleeting time of shallow fame.
After a year that saw over $300 million in damages from hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters...
Well, with a track record like that, they clearly had it coming, didn’t they?
Those firings ought to teach the remaining staff a lesson!
Make the weather great again!
Interesting, thanks! I understand the business rationale, and I can also imagine the difficulty to share methods that could reveal too much about one’s infrastructure, or could be too specific to an architecture to be broadly applicable to others. At the same time, as an outsider, I find it striking that mistakes seem to be endlessly repeated (by different entities) and I also imagine that those mistakes have the potential to fragilise not merely those who make them but to also spread to partners, suppliers and customers. In most fields, methods eventually mature and propagate as specialists move from one company to another; in this field, though, with new technologies and new threats seemingly appearing every week, I am not expecting spontaneous maturation to have much impact. On the positive side for security experts, that makes them all the more valuable!
Facebook 'Likes' Are a Powerful Tool For Authoritarian Rulers
...Facebook, (...) whom he accuses of falsely inflating his popularity through purchased "likes" and spreading fake news.
Well, Facebook is designed to be just that: a paid propaganda conduit enabling corporate customers (you know, the ones who actually pay Facebook) to get their kool-aid into the heads of billions of unwitting consumers. What else would motivate them to collectively pour billions of dollars into a service like Facebook? Follow us on Facebook, little people! Hammer your brain with our name, make it look like we’re the most popular and let us see everything about you, all in a single click!
And why think that politicians wouldn’t do the exact same thing when they regularly employ the same marketing agencies and the same mass propaganda techniques as commercial entities?
We spend as much on testing our security as we do on the security.
Not being in that field, I’m curious: does your company share (both as provider and recipient) methodology information (security best practices, etc.) with others in the financial sector (or with an even wider audience) or is it something that is considered somewhat secret (competitive advantage, etc.)?
In this case, isn’t it simply a liquid crystal?
Russia also is an active economic and diplomatic partner of North Korea. And that includes Internet connectivity.
Here’s a hypothesis (with apologies if it’s dumb or obvious): screen time is somewhat addictive; perhaps not formally so, but let’s say that on-screen content (games, online social interaction, news reading, etc.) can be so engaging that it’s harder to put down than a book and, unlike a book or a book chapter, often lacks a well-defined “end”. This leads regular consumers of online content to cut down on sleep time (possibly with an even greater impact on teenagers and children who need more sleep than adults). Screen time may also affect the quality of sleep (studies have been done about that, I believe). Over time, this lack or low quality of sleep durably disturbs brain functions and triggers depression, cognitive problems, etc. In other words, it might not be the content (or the medium) itself that’s the problem, but lack of quality sleep.
In spite of it being perhaps more difficult to exploit, I have the impression that large data centres operating virtual private servers (commercial and corporate alike) have good reasons to be seriously concerned about Spectre.
Citing Forbes, Wikipedia’s article on Spectre says: “Spectre has the potential of having a greater impact on cloud providers than Meltdown. Whereas Meltdown allows unauthorized applications to read from privileged memory to obtain sensitive data from processes running on the same cloud server, Spectre can allow malicious programs to induce a hypervisor to transmit the data to a guest system running on top of it.”
By contrast, Wikipedia’s article on Meltdown says: “Meltdown attack cannot be used to break out of a virtual machine.” (Of course, Meltdown is nonetheless a critical problem, for other reasons.)
Have a look at Wikipedia’s article on rail transport; particularly, in the “history” chapter, the parts about electric and diesel locomotives. It might sway your opinion a bit. There’s been plenty of innovation and research in the railway industry, and I find it rather interesting that its early adoption of the electric motor (beginning with the 1890 underground line in London) was largely spurred by environmental concerns.
Oh my god Oh my god Oh my god!!! They managed to get a photo of the secret password that was written on the super-secret Post-It-Note that was secretly affixed on the front of the terminal of our hyper-ultra-secret nuclear-threat-preparedness system! We’re soooooo totally screwed now!
And, of course, the owners never bother to leash and muzzle their premises.
"Journey to the Centre of the Moon" ...through a series of tubes.
Does this mean that the Moon already has Internet, then?
I’m really not fond of her interviewing style. I find that, like many seasoned journalists, she rarely lets her guests develop their thoughts for more than a few seconds, interrupting them and then speaking as much (if not more) than them. She has the irritating tendency to feed words to her guests (at least, those who are less comfortable speaking than her), starting a line of thought for them (as in “It must have felt so blah blah such and such. How did you feel when blah blah blah?”) and getting them to just repeat and complete the line, and so basically making them say something that they likely would not have quite said on their own. She may be confusing that technique with “getting them to open up” but, in reality, the result feels about as valuable as a forced police confession.
It’s a pity, given that her shows are pre-recorded and edited, giving her the opportunity to let guests take as much time as they’d like to precisely formulate their thoughts.
The explanation is more orthodox than some of the alternatives offered...
Unfortunately, no matter how extraordinary, scientific observations rarely (if ever) accommodate exciting far-fetched theories, leading disaffected audiences back to television...
Rockwell’s retro encabulator.
The spiritual successor of Chrysler’s turbo encabulator.
You’re running Windows 10 on a Retro Encabulator, aren’t you?
Michael Gruhn’s report on the vulnerability (linked in the article) has more information and is more understandable (to me) than the article itself.
Choice excerpts:
“An unauthorized third party can access: the location, model/type name, serial number (i.e. IMEI), assigned phone number, custom assigned name... of all location tracking devices managed by a vulnerable online service.”
“An unauthorized third party can: access the location history; send commands; activate and/or deactivate geo fencing alarm... [for] all location tracking devices managed by a vulnerable online service.”
“If you use an OBD GPS tracker that allows to immobilize your car and it is managed via a vulnerable online service we urge you to immediately detach it from your car and stop using it.”
Naturally, there are still things that matter and are worth being concerned about. For example, if poverty became so rampant that social unrest erupted, the economy tanked, banks failed, savings were wiped out, crime exploded, and war eventually broke out... all of a sudden, the prospect of sleeping late, followed by a leisurely brunch and a hike with the dog... might not sound so realistic or even so appealing any more.
Don’t get me wrong: you’re quite right to also enjoy the day and savour the fruits of your past efforts! I only mean to say that, regardless of our age and situation, there are things that really matter and they tend to be the same things. So the problem might not be so much that young people worry excessively about frivolous stuff (though they sure face a lot of pressure to do so, now mostly coming not from nature but from commercial concerns, whose influence I wish could be curbed); rather, it may be that they worry too little about stuff that really matters.
When freed from petty concerns, older generations might be in the position to help their successors pay some serious attention to important issues, ensuring that the insignificant does not displace the significant in younger people’s minds. And it won’t be enough to preach that such and such doesn’t really matter much, son! (That would be roundly rejected.) Instead, through personal engagement, leading by example, affirming and explaining “here is some of the stuff that I believe really matters, and let me tell you why I believe so...”
When personal computing started, it was largely run by enthusiasts who envisioned how liberating it could be. Of course, it soon became a booming business run by the usual people, guided by the usual (lack of) ethics and entirely focused on profit (and therefore, consumer control). Later, people thought that Internet could render obsolete traditional tightly-controlled advertiser-directed media like television. Well, what do we now have? And is that the fault of software and programmers? Programmers are employees, and they do as they’re told. I doubt anyone grew up dreaming: “When I’m grown-up, I’ll be a DRM or spyware software developer!”
What is much more stunning is the herd mentality exhibited by the public, mindlessly embracing technology of really dubious benefit yet with very obvious drawbacks in terms of personal freedom. Are consumers ever stopping to wonder: “Wait a minute, what’d happen with this product if...?” No, instead, the mood is “Shut up and take my money!”
Is that the fault of software? Or is it our collective fault? And if children are trained to be dumb consumers, is it the fault of the device we place into their hands, the malicious applications that we let them use and the dumb content that we make available to them through those devices? Or is it the fault of their educators (that’s us) who deprive them from meaningful conversations about serious topics, and the chance to develop the ability to think deeply, have an educated, polite and fruitful conversation, cultivate intellectual curiosity and doubts, enhance their awareness of the real world around them, and treasure human values like charity?
Blaming software would be like blaming food, and the abundance of food. Yup, most of us are obese and sick. No, it’s not the fault of farmers or produce. We need to look in the mirror and begin to honestly appraise the fundamentals of how we live (and want to live) as individuals and operate as a society.
Thanks for setting the tone for the new year. That’s the way policy and civil discourse are to be conducted from now on, isn’t it?
Person #1: “I have this idea/theory/observation. What do you guys think?”
Person #2 to everybody else: “Folks, move along, nothing to see here. That guy is an asshole and you all know it. Ignore him!”
There is no need for you, the operator, to be “certified”. The TLS certificate installed on your server merely increases the odds (for your users) that the machine serving the content (your server) is really the one that they expected (rather than a server operated by a malicious operator) and that the content received is really the content that was sent by that machine (rather than fake content fraudulently injected during transit by a malicious actor). It’s rather sensible to promote secure connections, and it does promote freedom by ensuring that web operators can serve their data without interference (from criminals, propagandists, etc.), and by enabling web users to trust that what they’re reading really came from who they think is serving it.
True, secure connections over HTTP require the server to have a valid certificate. So EFF and others have created a TLS certificate delivery system that is free, anonymous, automated and non-intrusive. It requires a little extra setup work on the part of the webmaster but, other than that, what great problems do you see with that scheme?
HTTPS prevents tampering with the connection. Even if nobody cares about your family pictures, someone cares about the opportunity that you give them to modify the content sent by your server before it reaches your relatives, do some social engineering at their expense (they’ll be convinced that whatever they see comes from trusted you) and get them to fall for a phishing trap or install malware. By serving through HTTPS, you are adding some protection for your relatives.