You know that Kenya and Nigeria are not the same, right?
I spent a couple of years working on 419 style scams. The origin was always, without fail, coastal west African nations. I don't recall even once seeing Kenya crop up. Don't paint all of sub-saharan Africa with the same brush.
That said, an AI capable of simulating a 14 year old girl? Hard to imagine they could even simulate a 5 year old successfully. This doesn't seem like a good use of a universities resources.
Any application intended to resist modern government surveillance is going to be extremely difficult to write, because it has to be resistant to bogus secret "court orders". The only way I know to do that is to have many independent developers engage in multi-party signatures of reproducible builds based on audited and reviewed open source code. If they're just going to run a company that develops it in a proprietary manner how will they achieve that?
I am more interested in Pond. It's being written by an actual cryptographer and he already has real, working code (though it's nowhere near releasable). It's up front about its security model and which threats can break it. It's built on top of Tor and even supports using the TPM chip so that when you press delete, the data is really really gone beyond the ability of any forensics tools to recover. It's even designed to resist traffic analysis. Anyone can run a server.
The main differences are that, obviously, Pond is not developed by a company, and it is focussed on asynchronous email style messaging rather than instant messaging. It's also got a very strong threat model that means it compromises on usability - for instance, there are no addresses in Pond, instead you are expected to hand out small files (perhaps on NFC tags?) to people who you want to be able to receive messages from (this is an anti-spam measure).
Despite all that it's a very interesting piece of research.
He was a sysadmin at the NSA and worked also for the CIA. You think the NSA didn't throw some parties when Stuxnet reported back that it worked? You don't think it was the watercool talk of the month when it leaked out? Your faith in the ability of organisations to internally compartmentalise things is interesting.
Uh, yes, the troops do send themselves overseas. Does America have the draft? I don't think so. If they go abroad and fight just because they have a shitty life at home and the military is a pay-rise, that's even more disgusting than if they are doing it for some warped ideological purpose.
The link with Republicanism is probably to do with age. If you look at the poll results, young people are far more outraged than old people, who seem to systematically skew authoritarian. Perhaps growing up in the environment of the cold war means they have a much stronger sympathy for spying and feel that no matter what the USA does, it must always be on the side of right rather than wrong. Young people with no memory of the cold war have no particular bias towards national secrecy.
I cannot speak for programs I have not worked in, but NSA wiretaps have played a role in EVERY modern day foreign crisis in the past 20 years. Mali, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, pirates in the Indian Ocean, and a lot more I'm forgetting because I've been out all night.
Are you for real or just an extremely skilled troll? It's hard to believe anyone could seriously write something so stupid.
Of course you've played a role in those "foreign crises", because you work for the US government which is the source of the crises in those countries. Those countries would obviously not be in any kind of crisis condition if they were not being constantly assaulted economically and physically by pliant tools like yourself.
I'll admit I was kinda uneasy about what we did when I first started here a few years ago, but I can even count the number of lives I have saved on my fingers in my first hand alone, so I think the ends justify the means.
The NSA is a part of the US military. The US military has directly killed far more people in those places than you can ever save.
On the off chance you're a real person, I'm going to make a suggestion. Tomorrow is Monday. Talk this over with your SO if you have one tonight, then go into work on Monday and hand in your resignation. Tell your boss you realised that you're a part of a machine that systematically causes crises in the middle east and you don't want to be a part of it any more, not even to try and save lives that were wrecked by your colleagues.
Then go find a job in the private sector using your skills to achieve positive outcomes at home, instead of negative outcomes abroad.
The average veteran in the USA is a war criminal. How is he supposed to demonstrate this fact other than by giving examples? Was Iraq invading the USA? Was Afghanistan? The people who fly the drones, are they fighting people who are attacking the USA?
The answer to all these things is clearly no. When people volunteer to take part in the US military, they volunteer to travel to some foreign country the other end of the Earth and bomb, snipe and shoot their way through the local populace to achieve extremely vague and open ended "goals" which are self evidently bullshit (bringing freedom or whatever). They volunteer knowing full well what they're going to do, how pointless it all is, and they sign up anyway.
How Americans go out of their way to engage in hero worship of vets is one of the most troubling and pathetic parts of US culture. You don't see it to anywhere near the same extent in other parts of the world. Maybe people if directly challenged would say "yes I support the troops" because any other answer is picking a fight, but the anti-Iraq-war rallies were the largest anti war protests in recorded history. That shows you what people really think of the military. I'll know there's a chance for the US when a politician gets up and says, "no, I don't support the troops". Not holding my breath.
The crazy is in thinking she can regulate better security onto any random industry. It doesn't work like that. Security is too complicated to magically fix by insisting on blind usage of a particular tool.
If you look at the article, a huge number of the breaches are to do with credit card leaks. Well, duh, credit cards are a pull model not a push model. Bitcoin is more sensible, but the California DFI is busy harassing Bitcoin companies. So if she really cares about upgraded security, maybe she should get the DFI off the back of people building more secure, cryptographic financial systems that compete with the incumbents? That's much less fun than coming up with new laws though.
Yes, the Israelis routinely spy on their sugar daddy. That attitude is but one of the many reasons that Israel is one of the worlds least popular countries, almost break even with North Korea. I don't think you should use them as an example of why that's OK. Incidentally the USA is less popular than the EU.
There have also been videos of presentations by firms who work in this area that teach companies how not to hire americans (You can google that). If their really was no advantage to hiring H1-B over a US worker, then why would companies go out of their way to disqualify US workers...?
Seriously? Have you ever actually been in a hiring position?
Hiring people is hard, and risky. Even in jobs where the skill set required is very precise and easily measured, as in engineering, there are all kinds of other random factors that can make or break a new hire (personality, lazyness, ability to co-operate, etc). Companies use every trick in the book to try and reduce this risk, most commonly by tapping employees networks to try and find other people who are known quantities, instead of the random walk-ins you get via normal hiring.
So now you have an open position. Maybe it requires specialised skills. Maybe it doesn't exactly require specialised skills, but there's someone who you just know would be the perfect fit for that position. You know they're capable, creative, etc. Only problem - not an American (and for "American" you can also read "European" for an EU based company, etc).
So what do you do? Obviously the "cannot hire an American to do the same work" standard is absurd, you can always hire an American to do any job, they just won't do it as well as the guy you actually want would. But you have to prove you tried. Hence - gaming of the system. The goal of this process is often not to hire just any H1-B because they're cheaper (they have to be paid the same salary or higher, right?), it's often to hire a specific person and this is especially true at the higher job levels.
The simplest solution would be to eliminate the "cannot hire an X" standard which is unenforceable, unmeasurable garbage anyway. Just ensure the salaries are the same, and, longer term, try and convince people that they don't have some kind of right to a well paid job just because they got lucky in the birth lottery. That other guy who is more qualified but has the wrong coloured skin should have a chance too.
Strong understanding of existing and emerging web standards, accessibility (WCAG1/2) and usability. Familiarity with several JavaScript libraries, including Backbone and JQuery
lolwut, familiarity with some random JavaScript library is required? Dude, start writing your own job ads. It's clear that whoever is churning these out has no clue.
Unfortunately judging from the questions asked in that poll as given further down by Okian Warrior, that confirmation bias would be accurate and reasonable in this case.
(A recent poll asked people if "Ben Ghazi" should be deported for his crimes, and many people said "yes, definitely!". It's easy to lead people into the position you want by framing it in the right way.)
It's ironic that in a post talking about misleading and biased poll questions, you refer to a "recent poll" asking people about Ben Ghazi. The only such "poll" I was able to find boiled down to some random girl on YouTube asking passersby on the beach. As you might expect, most of them were shirtless bro's. Example answer: "come on, we're better than that".
I happen to agree with what you wrote about the Assange poll, especially the second question which is a textbook case of how to produce manipulated polls. In the USA leaking IS a criminal matter so it'd not be surprising if a lot of people wrongly believed Assange had actually broken the law, meaning they couldn't reasonably answer "not a criminal matter". But you shouldn't segue from talking about opinion polls conducted by newspapers to "polls" conducted by some girl on a beachfront for laughs.
Usurper? Seriously? Firstly, Android is by many people's definitions more free than regular desktop Linux because it's licensed under a more permissive license.
Secondly, Android is actually a "desktop" Linux done right, by people who know what they're doing. As a disclaimer, I worked on desktop Linux related projects for years, about a decade ago. I wrote patches for GNOME, for ALSA, for Wine, and I also built an entire packaging and installer framework that tried to abstract out the differences between distributions so people could distribute their own applications without getting stuck into the swamp of distributor packaging (which was and always will be a shit idea). Many other things that I've forgotten about.
It was all a waste of time. Fundamentally, desktop Linux was not designed or built, it evolved organically. Any attempt to bring people together who might have some skill in OS design resulted in endless stupid flamewars and politics (does anyone remember the ridiculous KDE vs freedesktop wars?). The moment the community needed to move beyond the design laid out by the original creators of UNIX it all fell apart and became a mess.
Android is the best of all worlds - it's Free as in Freedom, it's managed centrally by a highly experienced team of computer scientists and OS designers (some of whom came from working on BeOS), the basic design decisions in it are correct - there's no crap whereby every phone manufacturer has to package every end user application. Heck you can see how popular with users it is just to have them distributing the core OS, you can imagine the disaster zone that'd occur if they used the Debian model. There's one audio API, that works. There's one graphics API, that works. It's standardised on one reasonably modern language, which works. No "we have to rewrite this from C++ into C for political reasons" garbage there.
Frankly it's a breath of fresh air and if it eventually wipes out traditional desktop Linux distros, you won't see me shed a tear despite all the work I did.
In fairness, aren't these the guys who were warning about the secret interpretations for years? Not all politicians are cut from the same cloth. The problem here is that they knew the NSA was lying but knew if they blew the whistle (which is their fucking job, being representatives of the people) then they'd go to the slammer. A simple solution would seem to be to pass a law saying that any classified information can be revealed by elected representatives at any time, and doing so automatically declassifies it with no penalty.
Tabarrok is also known for his work on how to fund public goods via non-patent means, in particular his dominant assurance contract form which is a variant of what Kickstarter does.
That's a fair and very insightful point. And I see now by re-reading your original post it was actually the point you were making all along, I just didn't see it.
It's not, actually. There are already asymmetric crypto algorithms which are believed to be quantum-resistant. They are typically based on the hardness of vector problems in n-dimensional integer lattices, or problems that have been proven reducible to such problems such as learning with errors.
Sure, but that sounds like pretty much any business. The idea that one man in a garage can get millions of users overnight thanks to free advertising in an app store is awesome, but it was never going to last and it was never how 99% of businesses are built.
Wow. It's easy to forget that the entire industry of programmable computers is younger than a lot of ordinary people walking around today. It makes me wonder what entirely new industry I might see develop from nothing over my lifetime.
What you're missing is that quite a few APIs get backported to older OS releases. It's less efficient to have apps contain copies of the libraries like that, but it does work. The trend is in this direction e.g. with play services. Obviously you can't backport everything like that, but a lot of the important stuff is (like new map widgets, etc). The difference between ICS and jellybean, API wise, isn't that huge. The big leap was Gingerbread to ICS. So, you really only have to pick between those two. You can just pretend Gingerbread doesn't exist if you like, the market share will still be larger than iPhone.
Except that cheap Android device are still a million years better than the old JavaME feature phones were. If people who buy cheap phones aren't buying your apps, maybe the issue is nobody is selling them a useful enough app? There's certainly an untapped market there. People should see that as an opportunity, not some sign of "weakness".
Heck, I'm an advanced user with plenty of money and the fact is, all the apps I want or could need on Android are free anyway. I bought TuneIn Pro because I listen to net radio a lot and it was worth it. Otherwise the apps I use most frequently are gratis.
Yes, exactly. A lot of the reason Gingerbread sticks around is because it's not a bad OS at all and it is the last version that had non-OpenGL based graphics. So it can run on pretty meagre hardware compared to ICS+. Some manufacturers are using Android's openness to fix the OS version and push down the price rather than keep price stable and push up the OS. Both approaches are valid and both are needed - the fact that Apple is blind to this market reality says more about them than Android.
Anyway this ignores the fact that Apple routinely updates older devices to the 'latest' OS that is actually something claiming to be the latest version, but doesn't have most of the new features. It's easy to play games with version numbers if you simply strip out anything requiring the latest hardware and still call it the latest OS.
Slashdot Mirror
You know that Kenya and Nigeria are not the same, right?
I spent a couple of years working on 419 style scams. The origin was always, without fail, coastal west African nations. I don't recall even once seeing Kenya crop up. Don't paint all of sub-saharan Africa with the same brush.
Age of consent in Spain is 13 though they plan to raise it. Seems like a 14 year old is an odd choice to emulate for that reason.
That said, an AI capable of simulating a 14 year old girl? Hard to imagine they could even simulate a 5 year old successfully. This doesn't seem like a good use of a universities resources.
Any application intended to resist modern government surveillance is going to be extremely difficult to write, because it has to be resistant to bogus secret "court orders". The only way I know to do that is to have many independent developers engage in multi-party signatures of reproducible builds based on audited and reviewed open source code. If they're just going to run a company that develops it in a proprietary manner how will they achieve that?
I am more interested in Pond. It's being written by an actual cryptographer and he already has real, working code (though it's nowhere near releasable). It's up front about its security model and which threats can break it. It's built on top of Tor and even supports using the TPM chip so that when you press delete, the data is really really gone beyond the ability of any forensics tools to recover. It's even designed to resist traffic analysis. Anyone can run a server.
The main differences are that, obviously, Pond is not developed by a company, and it is focussed on asynchronous email style messaging rather than instant messaging. It's also got a very strong threat model that means it compromises on usability - for instance, there are no addresses in Pond, instead you are expected to hand out small files (perhaps on NFC tags?) to people who you want to be able to receive messages from (this is an anti-spam measure).
Despite all that it's a very interesting piece of research.
He was a sysadmin at the NSA and worked also for the CIA. You think the NSA didn't throw some parties when Stuxnet reported back that it worked? You don't think it was the watercool talk of the month when it leaked out? Your faith in the ability of organisations to internally compartmentalise things is interesting.
Uh, yes, the troops do send themselves overseas. Does America have the draft? I don't think so. If they go abroad and fight just because they have a shitty life at home and the military is a pay-rise, that's even more disgusting than if they are doing it for some warped ideological purpose.
The link with Republicanism is probably to do with age. If you look at the poll results, young people are far more outraged than old people, who seem to systematically skew authoritarian. Perhaps growing up in the environment of the cold war means they have a much stronger sympathy for spying and feel that no matter what the USA does, it must always be on the side of right rather than wrong. Young people with no memory of the cold war have no particular bias towards national secrecy.
Are you for real or just an extremely skilled troll? It's hard to believe anyone could seriously write something so stupid.
Of course you've played a role in those "foreign crises", because you work for the US government which is the source of the crises in those countries. Those countries would obviously not be in any kind of crisis condition if they were not being constantly assaulted economically and physically by pliant tools like yourself.
The NSA is a part of the US military. The US military has directly killed far more people in those places than you can ever save.
On the off chance you're a real person, I'm going to make a suggestion. Tomorrow is Monday. Talk this over with your SO if you have one tonight, then go into work on Monday and hand in your resignation. Tell your boss you realised that you're a part of a machine that systematically causes crises in the middle east and you don't want to be a part of it any more, not even to try and save lives that were wrecked by your colleagues.
Then go find a job in the private sector using your skills to achieve positive outcomes at home, instead of negative outcomes abroad.
The average veteran in the USA is a war criminal. How is he supposed to demonstrate this fact other than by giving examples? Was Iraq invading the USA? Was Afghanistan? The people who fly the drones, are they fighting people who are attacking the USA?
The answer to all these things is clearly no. When people volunteer to take part in the US military, they volunteer to travel to some foreign country the other end of the Earth and bomb, snipe and shoot their way through the local populace to achieve extremely vague and open ended "goals" which are self evidently bullshit (bringing freedom or whatever). They volunteer knowing full well what they're going to do, how pointless it all is, and they sign up anyway.
How Americans go out of their way to engage in hero worship of vets is one of the most troubling and pathetic parts of US culture. You don't see it to anywhere near the same extent in other parts of the world. Maybe people if directly challenged would say "yes I support the troops" because any other answer is picking a fight, but the anti-Iraq-war rallies were the largest anti war protests in recorded history. That shows you what people really think of the military. I'll know there's a chance for the US when a politician gets up and says, "no, I don't support the troops". Not holding my breath.
The crazy is in thinking she can regulate better security onto any random industry. It doesn't work like that. Security is too complicated to magically fix by insisting on blind usage of a particular tool.
If you look at the article, a huge number of the breaches are to do with credit card leaks. Well, duh, credit cards are a pull model not a push model. Bitcoin is more sensible, but the California DFI is busy harassing Bitcoin companies. So if she really cares about upgraded security, maybe she should get the DFI off the back of people building more secure, cryptographic financial systems that compete with the incumbents? That's much less fun than coming up with new laws though.
EU grants asylum to Snowden. That would send the message home quite effectively.
Yes, the Israelis routinely spy on their sugar daddy. That attitude is but one of the many reasons that Israel is one of the worlds least popular countries, almost break even with North Korea. I don't think you should use them as an example of why that's OK. Incidentally the USA is less popular than the EU.
Seriously? Have you ever actually been in a hiring position?
Hiring people is hard, and risky. Even in jobs where the skill set required is very precise and easily measured, as in engineering, there are all kinds of other random factors that can make or break a new hire (personality, lazyness, ability to co-operate, etc). Companies use every trick in the book to try and reduce this risk, most commonly by tapping employees networks to try and find other people who are known quantities, instead of the random walk-ins you get via normal hiring.
So now you have an open position. Maybe it requires specialised skills. Maybe it doesn't exactly require specialised skills, but there's someone who you just know would be the perfect fit for that position. You know they're capable, creative, etc. Only problem - not an American (and for "American" you can also read "European" for an EU based company, etc).
So what do you do? Obviously the "cannot hire an American to do the same work" standard is absurd, you can always hire an American to do any job, they just won't do it as well as the guy you actually want would. But you have to prove you tried. Hence - gaming of the system. The goal of this process is often not to hire just any H1-B because they're cheaper (they have to be paid the same salary or higher, right?), it's often to hire a specific person and this is especially true at the higher job levels.
The simplest solution would be to eliminate the "cannot hire an X" standard which is unenforceable, unmeasurable garbage anyway. Just ensure the salaries are the same, and, longer term, try and convince people that they don't have some kind of right to a well paid job just because they got lucky in the birth lottery. That other guy who is more qualified but has the wrong coloured skin should have a chance too.
lolwut, familiarity with some random JavaScript library is required? Dude, start writing your own job ads. It's clear that whoever is churning these out has no clue.
Unfortunately judging from the questions asked in that poll as given further down by Okian Warrior, that confirmation bias would be accurate and reasonable in this case.
It's ironic that in a post talking about misleading and biased poll questions, you refer to a "recent poll" asking people about Ben Ghazi. The only such "poll" I was able to find boiled down to some random girl on YouTube asking passersby on the beach. As you might expect, most of them were shirtless bro's. Example answer: "come on, we're better than that".
I happen to agree with what you wrote about the Assange poll, especially the second question which is a textbook case of how to produce manipulated polls. In the USA leaking IS a criminal matter so it'd not be surprising if a lot of people wrongly believed Assange had actually broken the law, meaning they couldn't reasonably answer "not a criminal matter". But you shouldn't segue from talking about opinion polls conducted by newspapers to "polls" conducted by some girl on a beachfront for laughs.
Usurper? Seriously? Firstly, Android is by many people's definitions more free than regular desktop Linux because it's licensed under a more permissive license.
Secondly, Android is actually a "desktop" Linux done right, by people who know what they're doing. As a disclaimer, I worked on desktop Linux related projects for years, about a decade ago. I wrote patches for GNOME, for ALSA, for Wine, and I also built an entire packaging and installer framework that tried to abstract out the differences between distributions so people could distribute their own applications without getting stuck into the swamp of distributor packaging (which was and always will be a shit idea). Many other things that I've forgotten about.
It was all a waste of time. Fundamentally, desktop Linux was not designed or built, it evolved organically. Any attempt to bring people together who might have some skill in OS design resulted in endless stupid flamewars and politics (does anyone remember the ridiculous KDE vs freedesktop wars?). The moment the community needed to move beyond the design laid out by the original creators of UNIX it all fell apart and became a mess.
Android is the best of all worlds - it's Free as in Freedom, it's managed centrally by a highly experienced team of computer scientists and OS designers (some of whom came from working on BeOS), the basic design decisions in it are correct - there's no crap whereby every phone manufacturer has to package every end user application. Heck you can see how popular with users it is just to have them distributing the core OS, you can imagine the disaster zone that'd occur if they used the Debian model. There's one audio API, that works. There's one graphics API, that works. It's standardised on one reasonably modern language, which works. No "we have to rewrite this from C++ into C for political reasons" garbage there.
Frankly it's a breath of fresh air and if it eventually wipes out traditional desktop Linux distros, you won't see me shed a tear despite all the work I did.
In fairness, aren't these the guys who were warning about the secret interpretations for years? Not all politicians are cut from the same cloth. The problem here is that they knew the NSA was lying but knew if they blew the whistle (which is their fucking job, being representatives of the people) then they'd go to the slammer. A simple solution would seem to be to pass a law saying that any classified information can be revealed by elected representatives at any time, and doing so automatically declassifies it with no penalty.
Tabarrok is also known for his work on how to fund public goods via non-patent means, in particular his dominant assurance contract form which is a variant of what Kickstarter does.
That's a fair and very insightful point. And I see now by re-reading your original post it was actually the point you were making all along, I just didn't see it.
It's not, actually. There are already asymmetric crypto algorithms which are believed to be quantum-resistant. They are typically based on the hardness of vector problems in n-dimensional integer lattices, or problems that have been proven reducible to such problems such as learning with errors.
Sure, but that sounds like pretty much any business. The idea that one man in a garage can get millions of users overnight thanks to free advertising in an app store is awesome, but it was never going to last and it was never how 99% of businesses are built.
Wow. It's easy to forget that the entire industry of programmable computers is younger than a lot of ordinary people walking around today. It makes me wonder what entirely new industry I might see develop from nothing over my lifetime.
What you're missing is that quite a few APIs get backported to older OS releases. It's less efficient to have apps contain copies of the libraries like that, but it does work. The trend is in this direction e.g. with play services. Obviously you can't backport everything like that, but a lot of the important stuff is (like new map widgets, etc). The difference between ICS and jellybean, API wise, isn't that huge. The big leap was Gingerbread to ICS. So, you really only have to pick between those two. You can just pretend Gingerbread doesn't exist if you like, the market share will still be larger than iPhone.
Except that cheap Android device are still a million years better than the old JavaME feature phones were. If people who buy cheap phones aren't buying your apps, maybe the issue is nobody is selling them a useful enough app? There's certainly an untapped market there. People should see that as an opportunity, not some sign of "weakness".
Heck, I'm an advanced user with plenty of money and the fact is, all the apps I want or could need on Android are free anyway. I bought TuneIn Pro because I listen to net radio a lot and it was worth it. Otherwise the apps I use most frequently are gratis.
Yes, exactly. A lot of the reason Gingerbread sticks around is because it's not a bad OS at all and it is the last version that had non-OpenGL based graphics. So it can run on pretty meagre hardware compared to ICS+. Some manufacturers are using Android's openness to fix the OS version and push down the price rather than keep price stable and push up the OS. Both approaches are valid and both are needed - the fact that Apple is blind to this market reality says more about them than Android.
Anyway this ignores the fact that Apple routinely updates older devices to the 'latest' OS that is actually something claiming to be the latest version, but doesn't have most of the new features. It's easy to play games with version numbers if you simply strip out anything requiring the latest hardware and still call it the latest OS.