Exactly. People are getting more ware of privacy violations, but I expect that the vast majority of YT viewers give exactly zero fucks about the fact that a kiddie porn ring is abusing parts of the comments section. They might care if it's their comment section being abused, whether they are hosting the video or just commenting on it, but it's such a small section of YT that people will just ignore it. No one is going to cancel their account over this.
Advertisers on the other hand are very sensitive about this sort of thing, so YT should take note. But this has no similarity with the Cambridge Analytica scandal at all.
1) Is not that hard. When the GDPR came into effect, people feared that a lot of non EU sites would opt to simply block EU traffic instead of taking steps to comply. In practice I have only seen one such site... as it turns out, complying with the GDPR is not hard or costly for most sites, and for many it takes no effort at all. But this is different. I expect a lot of smaller operators to block EU access or at least block them from uploading anything.
But this is much worse: it's a first step to a priori censorship. MEPs are already contemplating using these filters to also stop the spread of terrorist ideology. Which at some point will also include extremist views. Which at some point will also include populist views. Which at some point will also include "fake" news. Which of course already includes any opinion not "fitting the narrative" of those in charge.
That was my thought as well. If I don't like certain social or political commenters on YT, I can just post a few inappropriate comments on their videos and take away their ad revenue.
Agreed. But even so, your content providers will miss that ad revenue just the same. Why not give them an option: either you risk losing ad revenue by having inappropriate comments on your videos, or you simply let YT delete the offensive ones.
They can't get the code if you enter it on the USB device itself. But even if the PIN is entered in the browser plugin for the device, you'd still want a physical button on the stick for each password retrieval. In that case, even if they manage to get your PIN and compromise the browser plugin so they can issue password retrieval requests remotely, they still won't be able to push that button and approve such requests. They get a couple of passwords at best, not the whole file and the master key.
Are there any decent USB stick based password vaults? Something that stores credentials internally and manages decryption after entering the master password. You’d still need to take care that the master password or decrypted credentials don’t linger in memory, but I’d feel better having the master data offline instead of having everything floating around in the cloud.
Even better would be an unlock pin (or fingerprint) to be entered on the USB stick itself.
I use a (wireless) gaming mouse for work related stuff as well. Looks a bit funky with the LED lighting but I prefer the ergonomics and button layout of a gaming mouse, plus I do some casual gaming where it comes in handy. As for the author's hangup about this particular model, it might be similar to the way some people cling to the old IBM clicky keyboard. Not a bad keyboard but I much prefer the ergonomics of modern keyboards, same for mice.
Exactly. I also prefer (longer) questions that out candidates at ease rather than put them on the spot. For example: “What problem in your career did you most enjoy solving?” Then just take it from there and go in-depth. Interviewees tend to open up when they get a chance to talk about stuff they are proud of or enjoyed doing.
There’s a difference between anonymising and aggregating. For purely statistical stuff, aggregated data often is good enough. In quite a few cases it does mean that whoever stores the data has to run the reports, and that’s a feature rather than an issue. Anonymised data on the other hand is problematic. For example they take off your name and SSN, but date of birth + zip code is still a pretty good identifier. Combine enough data sets and you can often still tie anonymised data to an individual profile.
You'll also strangle many legit sites, or make things rather inconvenient for users. I think we should start with laws against the sale of personal data (or passing such data on to other parts of the company), even anonymized data. Then put some additional restrictions on the laws we already have (some of us anyway), such as opt-in rules and the law that states that data can only be used for the purpose with which it was collected. Currently companies say that purpose is "anything, plus whatever comes to mind later". Better would be: you can only collect the data strictly necessary for the operation of the service you are offering, and only for that purpose. With some possible exceptions for aggregated data.
I live on a planet where thankfully I do not have to be aware of the amount of spam I am getting. Honestly, I have no idea. Not everything in my inbox is important, but everything - one or two spams that sneak past the filter aside - is legit.
So you get 500 mails a day. That’s still an insane amount but hey, if you can clear that pile in 5 hours, that’s actually pretty good. What the hell is all that, though? If it’s all similar stuff like support requests, you might consider using a better tool to channel it all, like a ticketing system. In general that’s a question you should ask yourself if you are considering just ignoring your inbox (or not replying to everything): what will replace it?
I’m always a bit surprised by people saying “I could be working instead of answering email”. What do you think answering email, i.e. communicating with your co-workers, is? If there is too much of it, especially before you’ve prioritised it, then you need to either manage your co-workers better, or talk to your boss as you may simply have too many responsibilities, or you live in a weird corporate culture with a lot of internal spam that can usually be handled with inbox rules quite well.
If you filter your emails down to the important stuff and you’re still left with too many to answer, you will have to talk to your co-workers because they might not be using the most effective way to communicate. (Tip: if you receive a reply to your reply to someone else’s reply, if the email chain turns into a lengthy back & forth or an n-way discussion, you need a face-to-face interaction or a meeting instead of using email). Or you need to talk to your boss as you may simply have too much on your plate. But think: if you simply start ignoring your emails, what will replace it? If nothing, then congratulations: chances are you have just made yourself irrelevant. Or perhaps you weren’t very good at filtering your mails.
Just delete the sugar email, that’s one second of your time. As for Bob, make it clear to him that you do not check your inbox continuously, as you shouldn’t. Phones or direct contact is how you deal with urgent stuff. If an urgent item is handled too late because it was sent by email, that’s on Bob, not on you. (And if your manager sees it differently, I’d recommend finding a different job).
Managing your e-mail - even large volumes of it - shouldn’t take much time:
- first, turn off the “ding”. Set aside time to manage your email and deal with it at those times, not when the machine tells you there’s new mail. Twice a day, once every morning, or more often; whatever works for you. But don’t ever be reactive when it comes to email.
- practise Inbox Zero or the 4Ds, or similar. These methods let you focus on sorting your email and prioritising it, getting rid of spam and stuff requiring no action right away. If necessary, send a brief reply. This should take only a few minutes.
- in the previous step you have identified the few emails that require your attention. At this stage you are not really “dealing with email” anymore, what’s left here should be part of your work.
So if you are dealing with email, it most certainly should be your priority... at certain short time slots during the day, and not at all outside those slots. So time-limiting rather than rate-limiting, by assigning the right priority you can handle large volumes in a surprisingly short amount of time. But if you are getting too many emails that are directly related to your assignment, you need to manage your co-workers in that regard.
Most textbooks really don't go out of date that quickly. But those who write and publish them obviously have an interest in issuing a new edition every year or two, so parents are forced to buy the new edition at a premium instead of buying one second hand or using a hand-me-down from an older sibling. And of course if textbooks go online, publishers can charge the full price every time even without issuing new editions; they just need to be sure that access to a textbook cannot be transferred between accounts.
Well, the mantra amongst educators the past few decades has been "the classroom sucks". And same as with textbooks, they've failed to come up with a better alternative. Even in places where internet is great and schools can afford the equipment to offer e-learning and/or computer assisted teaching, educators are still finding that a lot of the electronic learning aids are ineffective and rather expensive to produce.
Except after the tariffs they have another layer of regulations that keep your product from being sold in the USA.
The EU does the same, mainly to protect the interests of French farmers. It's said EU farm policy does damage to Africa in an amount greater than all the monetary aid we send there. Not sure if that's true, and recent changes have improved things a little, but there's still an awful lot of protectionist regulations.
Over here they sell wine and beer too. For some families, going to Ikea is a bit of an outing: you shop for furniture, have a decent and inexpensive lunch there, so why not pop in their deli and buy some interesting and unusual food to take home as well? Their deli always seems busy enough. I'm in an Ikea on a regular basis (the curse of letting furnished appts) and I often grab some food if we're short on anything at home. They have some pretty good bread.
Reminds me of a proverb (I think from Russia): "We cannot afford to buy cheap", meaning that spending more on quality goods is cheaper in the long run.
Happened here in the Netherlands. And yes, many people were outraged even if officials insisted it was only a friendly warning about possible consequences if things actually got out of hand. Article (from Google Translate)
Judged by an algorithm, that may have applied some hidden bias and/or might simply be wrong. So you get called into the principal's office about your booze problem, or a copper pays you a visit to talk about your latent violence issues, and then it's on you to explain to them and your parents that they are wrong.
Something similar happened here: a couple of mayors wanted to nip mounting resistance against new refugee centers in the bud, and decided to visit the most vocal opponents. One guy was visited at his business by two coppers who told him: "You are tweeting rather a lot. We have been ordered to ask you to mind your tone, as some of your tweets could be taken as inciting." Just a friendly warning and not at all aimed at silencing an opponent, according to city hall, but those who were visited had a rather different interpretation. This was just a couple dozen people manually selected by monitoring Twitter feeds, but the effect is clear: these people no longer feel free to speak out in public. Now imagine if everything you say is monitored by an AI and flagged for potential issues.
It’s pretty hard to go 100% carbon neutral without either access to reliable renewable power like geothermal or hydro, or by adding nuclear power into the mix. Many so called 100% clean renewable counties, provinces or companies manage that goal by using offsets, i.e. what they can’t generate directly with solar or wind, they buy from external wind and solar providers. The thing is, those providers sell as many MWh of green power as they actually generate, but the actually green power you buy it from them might well be generated by coal or nuclear at that moment. So this model breaks down when everyone tries to go green.
I'd much rather buy from a company firmly in the consumer electronics business than a company that is really into different pies. Especially data and / or content. Sony, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. People are getting more ware of privacy violations, but I expect that the vast majority of YT viewers give exactly zero fucks about the fact that a kiddie porn ring is abusing parts of the comments section. They might care if it's their comment section being abused, whether they are hosting the video or just commenting on it, but it's such a small section of YT that people will just ignore it. No one is going to cancel their account over this.
Advertisers on the other hand are very sensitive about this sort of thing, so YT should take note. But this has no similarity with the Cambridge Analytica scandal at all.
1) Is not that hard. When the GDPR came into effect, people feared that a lot of non EU sites would opt to simply block EU traffic instead of taking steps to comply. In practice I have only seen one such site... as it turns out, complying with the GDPR is not hard or costly for most sites, and for many it takes no effort at all. But this is different. I expect a lot of smaller operators to block EU access or at least block them from uploading anything.
But this is much worse: it's a first step to a priori censorship. MEPs are already contemplating using these filters to also stop the spread of terrorist ideology. Which at some point will also include extremist views. Which at some point will also include populist views. Which at some point will also include "fake" news. Which of course already includes any opinion not "fitting the narrative" of those in charge.
That's great if you know exactly what constitutes an inappropriate comment.
That was my thought as well. If I don't like certain social or political commenters on YT, I can just post a few inappropriate comments on their videos and take away their ad revenue.
Agreed. But even so, your content providers will miss that ad revenue just the same. Why not give them an option: either you risk losing ad revenue by having inappropriate comments on your videos, or you simply let YT delete the offensive ones.
They can't get the code if you enter it on the USB device itself. But even if the PIN is entered in the browser plugin for the device, you'd still want a physical button on the stick for each password retrieval. In that case, even if they manage to get your PIN and compromise the browser plugin so they can issue password retrieval requests remotely, they still won't be able to push that button and approve such requests. They get a couple of passwords at best, not the whole file and the master key.
Are there any decent USB stick based password vaults? Something that stores credentials internally and manages decryption after entering the master password. You’d still need to take care that the master password or decrypted credentials don’t linger in memory, but I’d feel better having the master data offline instead of having everything floating around in the cloud.
Even better would be an unlock pin (or fingerprint) to be entered on the USB stick itself.
I use a (wireless) gaming mouse for work related stuff as well. Looks a bit funky with the LED lighting but I prefer the ergonomics and button layout of a gaming mouse, plus I do some casual gaming where it comes in handy. As for the author's hangup about this particular model, it might be similar to the way some people cling to the old IBM clicky keyboard. Not a bad keyboard but I much prefer the ergonomics of modern keyboards, same for mice.
Exactly. I also prefer (longer) questions that out candidates at ease rather than put them on the spot. For example: “What problem in your career did you most enjoy solving?” Then just take it from there and go in-depth. Interviewees tend to open up when they get a chance to talk about stuff they are proud of or enjoyed doing.
There’s a difference between anonymising and aggregating. For purely statistical stuff, aggregated data often is good enough. In quite a few cases it does mean that whoever stores the data has to run the reports, and that’s a feature rather than an issue. Anonymised data on the other hand is problematic. For example they take off your name and SSN, but date of birth + zip code is still a pretty good identifier. Combine enough data sets and you can often still tie anonymised data to an individual profile.
You'll also strangle many legit sites, or make things rather inconvenient for users. I think we should start with laws against the sale of personal data (or passing such data on to other parts of the company), even anonymized data. Then put some additional restrictions on the laws we already have (some of us anyway), such as opt-in rules and the law that states that data can only be used for the purpose with which it was collected. Currently companies say that purpose is "anything, plus whatever comes to mind later". Better would be: you can only collect the data strictly necessary for the operation of the service you are offering, and only for that purpose. With some possible exceptions for aggregated data.
I live on a planet where thankfully I do not have to be aware of the amount of spam I am getting. Honestly, I have no idea. Not everything in my inbox is important, but everything - one or two spams that sneak past the filter aside - is legit.
So you get 500 mails a day. That’s still an insane amount but hey, if you can clear that pile in 5 hours, that’s actually pretty good. What the hell is all that, though? If it’s all similar stuff like support requests, you might consider using a better tool to channel it all, like a ticketing system. In general that’s a question you should ask yourself if you are considering just ignoring your inbox (or not replying to everything): what will replace it?
I’m always a bit surprised by people saying “I could be working instead of answering email”. What do you think answering email, i.e. communicating with your co-workers, is? If there is too much of it, especially before you’ve prioritised it, then you need to either manage your co-workers better, or talk to your boss as you may simply have too many responsibilities, or you live in a weird corporate culture with a lot of internal spam that can usually be handled with inbox rules quite well.
If you filter your emails down to the important stuff and you’re still left with too many to answer, you will have to talk to your co-workers because they might not be using the most effective way to communicate. (Tip: if you receive a reply to your reply to someone else’s reply, if the email chain turns into a lengthy back & forth or an n-way discussion, you need a face-to-face interaction or a meeting instead of using email). Or you need to talk to your boss as you may simply have too much on your plate. But think: if you simply start ignoring your emails, what will replace it? If nothing, then congratulations: chances are you have just made yourself irrelevant. Or perhaps you weren’t very good at filtering your mails.
Just delete the sugar email, that’s one second of your time. As for Bob, make it clear to him that you do not check your inbox continuously, as you shouldn’t. Phones or direct contact is how you deal with urgent stuff. If an urgent item is handled too late because it was sent by email, that’s on Bob, not on you. (And if your manager sees it differently, I’d recommend finding a different job).
Managing your e-mail - even large volumes of it - shouldn’t take much time:
- first, turn off the “ding”. Set aside time to manage your email and deal with it at those times, not when the machine tells you there’s new mail. Twice a day, once every morning, or more often; whatever works for you. But don’t ever be reactive when it comes to email.
- practise Inbox Zero or the 4Ds, or similar. These methods let you focus on sorting your email and prioritising it, getting rid of spam and stuff requiring no action right away. If necessary, send a brief reply. This should take only a few minutes.
- in the previous step you have identified the few emails that require your attention. At this stage you are not really “dealing with email” anymore, what’s left here should be part of your work.
So if you are dealing with email, it most certainly should be your priority... at certain short time slots during the day, and not at all outside those slots. So time-limiting rather than rate-limiting, by assigning the right priority you can handle large volumes in a surprisingly short amount of time. But if you are getting too many emails that are directly related to your assignment, you need to manage your co-workers in that regard.
Anybody who has had an inside look knows that the porn business is a hell of a lot more wholesome than the business of government.
Most textbooks really don't go out of date that quickly. But those who write and publish them obviously have an interest in issuing a new edition every year or two, so parents are forced to buy the new edition at a premium instead of buying one second hand or using a hand-me-down from an older sibling. And of course if textbooks go online, publishers can charge the full price every time even without issuing new editions; they just need to be sure that access to a textbook cannot be transferred between accounts.
Well, the mantra amongst educators the past few decades has been "the classroom sucks". And same as with textbooks, they've failed to come up with a better alternative. Even in places where internet is great and schools can afford the equipment to offer e-learning and/or computer assisted teaching, educators are still finding that a lot of the electronic learning aids are ineffective and rather expensive to produce.
Except after the tariffs they have another layer of regulations that keep your product from being sold in the USA.
The EU does the same, mainly to protect the interests of French farmers. It's said EU farm policy does damage to Africa in an amount greater than all the monetary aid we send there. Not sure if that's true, and recent changes have improved things a little, but there's still an awful lot of protectionist regulations.
Over here they sell wine and beer too. For some families, going to Ikea is a bit of an outing: you shop for furniture, have a decent and inexpensive lunch there, so why not pop in their deli and buy some interesting and unusual food to take home as well? Their deli always seems busy enough. I'm in an Ikea on a regular basis (the curse of letting furnished appts) and I often grab some food if we're short on anything at home. They have some pretty good bread.
Reminds me of a proverb (I think from Russia): "We cannot afford to buy cheap", meaning that spending more on quality goods is cheaper in the long run.
Happened here in the Netherlands. And yes, many people were outraged even if officials insisted it was only a friendly warning about possible consequences if things actually got out of hand. Article (from Google Translate)
Judged by an algorithm, that may have applied some hidden bias and/or might simply be wrong. So you get called into the principal's office about your booze problem, or a copper pays you a visit to talk about your latent violence issues, and then it's on you to explain to them and your parents that they are wrong.
Something similar happened here: a couple of mayors wanted to nip mounting resistance against new refugee centers in the bud, and decided to visit the most vocal opponents. One guy was visited at his business by two coppers who told him: "You are tweeting rather a lot. We have been ordered to ask you to mind your tone, as some of your tweets could be taken as inciting." Just a friendly warning and not at all aimed at silencing an opponent, according to city hall, but those who were visited had a rather different interpretation. This was just a couple dozen people manually selected by monitoring Twitter feeds, but the effect is clear: these people no longer feel free to speak out in public. Now imagine if everything you say is monitored by an AI and flagged for potential issues.
It’s pretty hard to go 100% carbon neutral without either access to reliable renewable power like geothermal or hydro, or by adding nuclear power into the mix. Many so called 100% clean renewable counties, provinces or companies manage that goal by using offsets, i.e. what they can’t generate directly with solar or wind, they buy from external wind and solar providers. The thing is, those providers sell as many MWh of green power as they actually generate, but the actually green power you buy it from them might well be generated by coal or nuclear at that moment. So this model breaks down when everyone tries to go green.
I'd much rather buy from a company firmly in the consumer electronics business than a company that is really into different pies. Especially data and / or content. Sony, for instance.