If your fridge or furnace can be turned off completely by remote (or even locally), you're doing it wrong. Think for a moment what you are automating. The temperature, not the furnace. Your thermostat will be controllable, the furnace will remain just a dumb unconnected piece of equipment, but smart enough to remain operating within acceptable limits even if the thermostat is compromised. I have a fairly comprehensively automated home, but with full control or even the ability to operate devices outside their normal limits, you could do very little actual damage there, and cause a minor inconvenience at best. It's good to be careful and wary of any connected device, but at some point it's just fearmongering and/or a complete misunderstanding of the actual risks.
By the way, I'd be happy to accept liability for any damages such as the ones you describe, if I were selling you a home automation setup.
HA setups typically store very little data, what little is there is hardly worth taking, and certainly not worth worrying about. If a router in my house were open, I'd be much more worried about the stuff they could steal off my computers and NAS than the stuff stored in my "things". Besides, if data is exposed through a flaw in my router, there would still need to be someone aware of that fact and in a position to collect and exploit the data. If instead you are using IoT-devices, your data is harvested and abused by default with a 100% certainty, by the mothership.
I'm a fan of home automation (a hobby of mine that's increasingly turning into a business). I, and many fellow HA enthusiasts, are firm proponents of the LAN of Things, or even a Separate Network - Controlled By a Hub That is Only Allowed To Connect To the Internet Under Strict Conditions - Of Things. There are plenty of useful ways to automate your home (no, nothing essential or life-changing, but sometimes very convenient), but very little of that requires data to leave the house. And when it does, it should only happen on your own terms. And cameras? The ones around my house have their power cut off externally when we're home, and show a light when they are on (a separate dumb LED on the same power supply). No use taking any chances there.
Seems to me most mission planners would avoid going near borders of countries they do not have an alliance with, or at the very least announce their missions up front to their more-or-less-allies (something Russia often neglects to do, and other nations active in the region have already complained about that). And Turkey is fast ceasing to be a civilized nation. This incident has all the rancid stink of a pissing contest gone wrong.
Those parties are not really fighting amongst themselves; but they do have different interests in Syria. While their common goal is to fight IS, they each want to use this conflict as an opportunity to back their own horse in this race. Russia bombs the "moderate" rebels opposing Assad, while the rest likes to support those rebels. Meanwhile, Turkey bombs the Kurds.
By the way, Russia has a long history of violating the airspace of other nations. I'm surprised there hasn't been such an incident earlier.
On the flip side, programmers may receive better answers on SO than the ones they had come up with themselves, and gain new insights in programming patterns, use of SDKs, etc. That sort of learning and sharing of knowledge is encouraged and facilitated in other fields for good reason, and I've learned a good many things that way myself. As long as the answer explains or shows how to solve the problem instead of actually solving it completely. Post text or pseudocode rather than complete working code fragments. Same way you teach your kid how to fix a punctured bicycle tyre: don't fix it for him, but let him fix it under your guidance.
It also is much harder to figure out the specific person who carries the hacked pacemaker. With normal ransomware, you don't have to know anything about the person who owns the hacked computer, since the same computer is delivering the ransom note. It does make a lot more sense to hold a city, a hospital, or the manufacturer to ransom.
This. In most companies I see few or no senior devs. What they call senior devs are people with a mere 5 years of experience. And management refuses to even let those so-called seniors set aside time to coach the junior coders. And then they wonder why so many projects fail to live up even to minimal expectations.
I am very much in favour of the government being allowed to access private communications in individual cases with due cause and a legally obtained warrant issued by a judge. However, "being allowed" should in no way shape or form imply that zero knowledge encryption should be forbidden. Security issues aside, various governments, including my own, have time and time again shown that they absolutely cannot be trusted with such power, or trusted to play by their own rules.
Maybe BB thinks to cater to the "I have nothing to hide" crowd. I wonder how long those people would keep to that line if the government would send them a notice every time an operative listened in on their private phone calls. A bit like those notices the TSA sometimes leave in my luggage when I travel to the USA.
Plus, if enough other people put in their $100, you get 6 episodes for that price. A little over $16 apiece. I'm not sure how much the DVDs where back when they sold those, but it's close IIRC.
Personally I am happy to get just the 3 episodes for my money.
Same as Battlefield 4. $60 buys you what amounts to a trial version, with the right to beta-test a couple of levels, and paying extra for the DLC that completes the game. The Ultimate Edition gets you the complete game with 4 expansion packs for $120. Consider that the real price.
I'm not against DLC or against releasing a game early with only a few levels, as it gives me a chance to see if I like the game without paying full price. But at $60 I feel like I'm already paying full price for a fulll game. This seems like a tactic to jack up the price.
Coding is a lot easier to learn than most people think, and a lot harder to master than most PHBs realize.
Even the high school wiz kid who has published mobile apps and sets up a Linux server in the time you need to finish your coffee has a thing or two or two thousand to learn about coding in a professional environment. Algorithms, design patterns and best practices, toolchains, documentation, interpreting and drafting design documents, work processes, the list goes on. Coding is easy in the sense that any kid who das done coding in high school will be able to turn out more or less functional code for your company. But if you think a junior coder can make design decisions or work unsupervised, then you will end up with, well, the godawful messy software that a lot of companies seem to be struggling with.
It's both interesting and sad that coding as a career path is a rare thing these days. Coding is seen as an entry level job, where coders will inevitably at some point move on to software design / architecture or management, instead of being given more responsibilities in management, strategy, coaching or design while still practising and improving on their coding skills. Where I work I see few to none top coders who are still actively coding or even just coaching; a "senior coder" is someone with 5 years experience. These then get promoted, the junior coders are left to fend for themselves, while management blames the resulting mess on "lack of process"
Not to mention the page itself which is laden with ads. Plus the rubbish article. I never found Forbes a great magazine to begin with, something for a PHB to read on the airplane to appear intellectual, but it's really gone to the dogs lately judging from the last few articles linked here.
Re point 4: my understanding of current theory was that if you can send information faster than light, then it is possible to send information back in time.
After 9-11 I saw young Moroccans celebrating in the streets. I also saw muslims of Indonesian, Turkish, Surinamese origin and older Moroccans scolding them. Young Moroccans are exceptionally troublesome here, compared to other groups. The reason is youthful bashfulness in an unfortunate mix with certain cultural aspects, upbringing, and socio-economic issues. Religion certainly plays a role, and hardline muslims (operating from mosques sponsored by S.A.) are all too happy to recruit from these younsters, but it is not the sole cause of the problems. For these kids, religion provides an identity and serves as an excuse for their actions. To them, it's more gang culture than a belief system.
The problem right now is that one half of the country expresses extreme tolerance towards muslims, giving them a free pass on many things that would land anyone else in hot water with the law. The other half has given up and turned their backs on all muslims. That's not going to work if we are to continue to live together. What we should do is to treat muslims like everyone else. Exactly like everyone else. If someone gets fired from a public-interface job because they refuse to shake women's hands, it's their own damn fault, not intolerance towards their beliefs. Your former boss should have seen that incident for what it was instead of tiptoeing around religious sensitivities. If Moroccan kids make trouble, don't go easy on them "to avoid issues with the community" as happens so often; these kids already know they can get away with murder, sometimes to the desperation of their parents. And if we want to call the nastier aspects of islam into question, we should be able to do so openly without being called recist or worse. From now on, let's ignore the "race / religion card" if they play it, and treat them fairly for the rest.
I never denied there is a link. My point is: if you condemn islam itself, you're doing a disservice to moderate muslims, and to our sometimes tenuous relations with them. We want the moderates on our side, not siding with the extremists. And that's what you'll get if you turn it into a "with us or against us" situation.
I would hesitate to call islam "evil" and thereby brand every muslim as an evil person as well. I have muslims amongst my friends and colleagues, and even the more devout ones are guys like you and me, who just want to get along and get on with their lives, and who are just as appalled at these attacks. The less devout ones will happily share a good scotch or go out for beers after work. Not real muslims? If they call themselves that, they are (even it it means a mighty struggle against their more hardline brethren).
That does not mean that there are some pretty bad things in the qur'an itself (just like the bible, I might add). We should be careful to call every individual muslim to task for the literal text in the qur'an without knowing what their stance is, but we should also not shy away from criticizing the bad things coming out of islam or islamic cultures: genital mutilation, violence against homosexuals, nonbelievers, and apostates, or oppression of women, to name a few. Sadly in Europe the debate is pretty black and white it seems: it's either "muslims are bad", or "you're an imperialist intolerant lowlife for criticizing minority cultures". There is a middle ground, and it's not a compromise, but it is recognition of the fact that not all muslims are alike. Don't condemn the group, condemn the atrocities, the actual violation of human rights, and those who do the violating.
Indeed, the two have been conflated. And it's not just illegal immigration; the way some countries are handling immigration (or refraining from handling it) and open their borderds to any and all is also in violation of national laws or international treaties. Even so, it's not well done to mix politics with science in this way. However I do wonder if the reaction and backlash would have been the same if Jobb would have banned the use of his software in countries that oppose unlimited immigration, such as Hungary or Slovenia.
Neither is Uber. They have a disruptive business model made possible by the ubiquity of cell phones, a pretty basic app and backend, and a variable pricing algorithm that really isn't all that complicated. Calling them a technology company is a bit of a stretch.
The interaction doesn't have to be mandatory. There's been some talk here of an app to accompany ads on public television. The interaction can be in the form of you proving that you have watched the airing of a particular ad (scanning an on screen QR code or some such), in return for a chance to win a crappy prize or getting a discount on the advertised product.
I happened to saw something similar on an episode of "Master of none" yesterday. It wasn't just an offhand remark about Uber either, the guy got out his phone and said something to the effect of "I'll just get an Uber, there's an Uber black 15 minutes away or we can get an Uber X", or some such. At least they didn't stop to explain the different services as well... but it was still jarring.
For those "reality shows", that's easy: they can simply expand those "up next: Chumley eats a Curta calculator on a dare" and "earlier we saw Adam attempt to light a shark on fire using parabolic mirrors" segments around commercial breaks. Seriously, not counting those segments, is there even 23 minutes of actual content left?
Slashdot Mirror
If your fridge or furnace can be turned off completely by remote (or even locally), you're doing it wrong. Think for a moment what you are automating. The temperature, not the furnace. Your thermostat will be controllable, the furnace will remain just a dumb unconnected piece of equipment, but smart enough to remain operating within acceptable limits even if the thermostat is compromised. I have a fairly comprehensively automated home, but with full control or even the ability to operate devices outside their normal limits, you could do very little actual damage there, and cause a minor inconvenience at best. It's good to be careful and wary of any connected device, but at some point it's just fearmongering and/or a complete misunderstanding of the actual risks.
By the way, I'd be happy to accept liability for any damages such as the ones you describe, if I were selling you a home automation setup.
HA setups typically store very little data, what little is there is hardly worth taking, and certainly not worth worrying about. If a router in my house were open, I'd be much more worried about the stuff they could steal off my computers and NAS than the stuff stored in my "things". Besides, if data is exposed through a flaw in my router, there would still need to be someone aware of that fact and in a position to collect and exploit the data. If instead you are using IoT-devices, your data is harvested and abused by default with a 100% certainty, by the mothership.
I'm a fan of home automation (a hobby of mine that's increasingly turning into a business). I, and many fellow HA enthusiasts, are firm proponents of the LAN of Things, or even a Separate Network - Controlled By a Hub That is Only Allowed To Connect To the Internet Under Strict Conditions - Of Things. There are plenty of useful ways to automate your home (no, nothing essential or life-changing, but sometimes very convenient), but very little of that requires data to leave the house. And when it does, it should only happen on your own terms. And cameras? The ones around my house have their power cut off externally when we're home, and show a light when they are on (a separate dumb LED on the same power supply). No use taking any chances there.
Seems to me most mission planners would avoid going near borders of countries they do not have an alliance with, or at the very least announce their missions up front to their more-or-less-allies (something Russia often neglects to do, and other nations active in the region have already complained about that). And Turkey is fast ceasing to be a civilized nation. This incident has all the rancid stink of a pissing contest gone wrong.
Those parties are not really fighting amongst themselves; but they do have different interests in Syria. While their common goal is to fight IS, they each want to use this conflict as an opportunity to back their own horse in this race. Russia bombs the "moderate" rebels opposing Assad, while the rest likes to support those rebels. Meanwhile, Turkey bombs the Kurds.
By the way, Russia has a long history of violating the airspace of other nations. I'm surprised there hasn't been such an incident earlier.
On the flip side, programmers may receive better answers on SO than the ones they had come up with themselves, and gain new insights in programming patterns, use of SDKs, etc. That sort of learning and sharing of knowledge is encouraged and facilitated in other fields for good reason, and I've learned a good many things that way myself. As long as the answer explains or shows how to solve the problem instead of actually solving it completely. Post text or pseudocode rather than complete working code fragments. Same way you teach your kid how to fix a punctured bicycle tyre: don't fix it for him, but let him fix it under your guidance.
It also is much harder to figure out the specific person who carries the hacked pacemaker. With normal ransomware, you don't have to know anything about the person who owns the hacked computer, since the same computer is delivering the ransom note. It does make a lot more sense to hold a city, a hospital, or the manufacturer to ransom.
This. In most companies I see few or no senior devs. What they call senior devs are people with a mere 5 years of experience. And management refuses to even let those so-called seniors set aside time to coach the junior coders. And then they wonder why so many projects fail to live up even to minimal expectations.
Indeed. One word: "Ewok".
I am very much in favour of the government being allowed to access private communications in individual cases with due cause and a legally obtained warrant issued by a judge. However, "being allowed" should in no way shape or form imply that zero knowledge encryption should be forbidden. Security issues aside, various governments, including my own, have time and time again shown that they absolutely cannot be trusted with such power, or trusted to play by their own rules.
Maybe BB thinks to cater to the "I have nothing to hide" crowd. I wonder how long those people would keep to that line if the government would send them a notice every time an operative listened in on their private phone calls. A bit like those notices the TSA sometimes leave in my luggage when I travel to the USA.
Plus, if enough other people put in their $100, you get 6 episodes for that price. A little over $16 apiece. I'm not sure how much the DVDs where back when they sold those, but it's close IIRC.
Personally I am happy to get just the 3 episodes for my money.
Movies need to be fun. Leave the preaching to Sunday mass.
Same as Battlefield 4. $60 buys you what amounts to a trial version, with the right to beta-test a couple of levels, and paying extra for the DLC that completes the game. The Ultimate Edition gets you the complete game with 4 expansion packs for $120. Consider that the real price.
I'm not against DLC or against releasing a game early with only a few levels, as it gives me a chance to see if I like the game without paying full price. But at $60 I feel like I'm already paying full price for a fulll game. This seems like a tactic to jack up the price.
Coding is a lot easier to learn than most people think, and a lot harder to master than most PHBs realize.
Even the high school wiz kid who has published mobile apps and sets up a Linux server in the time you need to finish your coffee has a thing or two or two thousand to learn about coding in a professional environment. Algorithms, design patterns and best practices, toolchains, documentation, interpreting and drafting design documents, work processes, the list goes on. Coding is easy in the sense that any kid who das done coding in high school will be able to turn out more or less functional code for your company. But if you think a junior coder can make design decisions or work unsupervised, then you will end up with, well, the godawful messy software that a lot of companies seem to be struggling with.
It's both interesting and sad that coding as a career path is a rare thing these days. Coding is seen as an entry level job, where coders will inevitably at some point move on to software design / architecture or management, instead of being given more responsibilities in management, strategy, coaching or design while still practising and improving on their coding skills. Where I work I see few to none top coders who are still actively coding or even just coaching; a "senior coder" is someone with 5 years experience. These then get promoted, the junior coders are left to fend for themselves, while management blames the resulting mess on "lack of process"
Not to mention the page itself which is laden with ads. Plus the rubbish article. I never found Forbes a great magazine to begin with, something for a PHB to read on the airplane to appear intellectual, but it's really gone to the dogs lately judging from the last few articles linked here.
Re point 4: my understanding of current theory was that if you can send information faster than light, then it is possible to send information back in time.
After 9-11 I saw young Moroccans celebrating in the streets. I also saw muslims of Indonesian, Turkish, Surinamese origin and older Moroccans scolding them. Young Moroccans are exceptionally troublesome here, compared to other groups. The reason is youthful bashfulness in an unfortunate mix with certain cultural aspects, upbringing, and socio-economic issues. Religion certainly plays a role, and hardline muslims (operating from mosques sponsored by S.A.) are all too happy to recruit from these younsters, but it is not the sole cause of the problems. For these kids, religion provides an identity and serves as an excuse for their actions. To them, it's more gang culture than a belief system.
The problem right now is that one half of the country expresses extreme tolerance towards muslims, giving them a free pass on many things that would land anyone else in hot water with the law. The other half has given up and turned their backs on all muslims. That's not going to work if we are to continue to live together. What we should do is to treat muslims like everyone else. Exactly like everyone else. If someone gets fired from a public-interface job because they refuse to shake women's hands, it's their own damn fault, not intolerance towards their beliefs. Your former boss should have seen that incident for what it was instead of tiptoeing around religious sensitivities. If Moroccan kids make trouble, don't go easy on them "to avoid issues with the community" as happens so often; these kids already know they can get away with murder, sometimes to the desperation of their parents. And if we want to call the nastier aspects of islam into question, we should be able to do so openly without being called recist or worse. From now on, let's ignore the "race / religion card" if they play it, and treat them fairly for the rest.
I never denied there is a link. My point is: if you condemn islam itself, you're doing a disservice to moderate muslims, and to our sometimes tenuous relations with them. We want the moderates on our side, not siding with the extremists. And that's what you'll get if you turn it into a "with us or against us" situation.
I would hesitate to call islam "evil" and thereby brand every muslim as an evil person as well. I have muslims amongst my friends and colleagues, and even the more devout ones are guys like you and me, who just want to get along and get on with their lives, and who are just as appalled at these attacks. The less devout ones will happily share a good scotch or go out for beers after work. Not real muslims? If they call themselves that, they are (even it it means a mighty struggle against their more hardline brethren).
That does not mean that there are some pretty bad things in the qur'an itself (just like the bible, I might add). We should be careful to call every individual muslim to task for the literal text in the qur'an without knowing what their stance is, but we should also not shy away from criticizing the bad things coming out of islam or islamic cultures: genital mutilation, violence against homosexuals, nonbelievers, and apostates, or oppression of women, to name a few. Sadly in Europe the debate is pretty black and white it seems: it's either "muslims are bad", or "you're an imperialist intolerant lowlife for criticizing minority cultures". There is a middle ground, and it's not a compromise, but it is recognition of the fact that not all muslims are alike. Don't condemn the group, condemn the atrocities, the actual violation of human rights, and those who do the violating.
Indeed, the two have been conflated. And it's not just illegal immigration; the way some countries are handling immigration (or refraining from handling it) and open their borderds to any and all is also in violation of national laws or international treaties. Even so, it's not well done to mix politics with science in this way. However I do wonder if the reaction and backlash would have been the same if Jobb would have banned the use of his software in countries that oppose unlimited immigration, such as Hungary or Slovenia.
Neither is Uber. They have a disruptive business model made possible by the ubiquity of cell phones, a pretty basic app and backend, and a variable pricing algorithm that really isn't all that complicated. Calling them a technology company is a bit of a stretch.
The interaction doesn't have to be mandatory. There's been some talk here of an app to accompany ads on public television. The interaction can be in the form of you proving that you have watched the airing of a particular ad (scanning an on screen QR code or some such), in return for a chance to win a crappy prize or getting a discount on the advertised product.
I happened to saw something similar on an episode of "Master of none" yesterday. It wasn't just an offhand remark about Uber either, the guy got out his phone and said something to the effect of "I'll just get an Uber, there's an Uber black 15 minutes away or we can get an Uber X", or some such. At least they didn't stop to explain the different services as well... but it was still jarring.
For those "reality shows", that's easy: they can simply expand those "up next: Chumley eats a Curta calculator on a dare" and "earlier we saw Adam attempt to light a shark on fire using parabolic mirrors" segments around commercial breaks. Seriously, not counting those segments, is there even 23 minutes of actual content left?
Is "planet" the new "big-boned"?