Sorry having fully read the report now I'm gonna guess that Duqu is more likely to be Israeli intelligence than the NSA. The report notes that at least one victim has been hacked by the "Equation Group" (very clearly NSA) and Duqu at the same time. Additionally the target list is things like anything to do with the Iranian nuclear program (very interesting to the Israelis) and also something to do with an anniversary of an event related to Auschwitz? Doesn't seem likely to interest the Americans. And apparently the few unfaked timestamps that remain are GMT+2 or GMT+3, the developers work on January 1st, and there's at least one English spelling mistake in the code.
Additionally, Duqu and Stuxnet are apparently somehow related but not quite the same thing, and we know from leaks by US officials wanting to take credit that Stuxnet was a US/Israeli collaboration.
They were probably aware that this would come up anyway so their PR department took action
Come up how? Who the hell cares about hacking an anti-virus company except intelligence agencies anyway? They, at least for now it seems, aren't in the business of blackmailing companies in ways that could only lead directly back to them.
To be hacked when you are a security focused company is hurting their image whatever advanced attack was used
No way! This can only help their image, not hurt it.
Look. This attack speaks to the idiocy and hubris of whichever intelligence agency is behind Duqu (probably the NSA, iirc). Kaspersky have repeatedly revealed western intelligence malware; they are not idiots, as anyone who reads their reports can attest. Indeed they've done massively more than any other AV company in the business. The people who thought it was a good idea to attack a company staffed by some of the best reverse engineers in the industry must be crazy: they just burned three zero days..... for what? To get a sneak preview of upcoming products? Those must be some mighty scary products!
What sort of message does this send to anyone outside the USA? It says that Kaspersky AV is so frickin' badass that the world's best funded intelligence agencies tried to spy on it..... and failed. It says that Kaspersky, being Russian, doesn't give a shit about being prosecuted by the US government and will happily add NSA malware to their AV product scans, it reinforces their image of being in the lead when it comes to analysing state-sponsored malware, it reveals a strong commitment to transparency (they could have said nothing), and it says "if you think you may be targeted by government attackers, you can't do better than buy Kaspersky AV".
The reason why companies develop new languages is because the ones coming from academia are focused on the wrong things. Product development requires an industrial strength, strongly typed (for the most part) fast language.
Projects coming from academia are interpreted, JVM based, functional, obsessed with (im)mutability, closures, and lambda functions
Whilst I don't disagree that academic languages rarely get used directly in industry, one of the world's most successful industrial programming languages is Java, and Java is interpreted, JVM based, and in version 8 got things like functional streams and lambda functions. Still no help with immutability, but value types will partly address that.
So choosing these features as examples of stuff that's irrelevant to large scale industrial systems seems particularly perverse.
Once you learn of an investigation or a law suit, or can be reasonably expected to know one is coming, it's incumbent upon you to save all records
The article claims that since Sarbanes-Oxley this statement is no longer true: destruction of records can be a crime even if you had no idea there was an investigation taking place.
This sounds absurd but there are other US laws that turn people into "accidental criminals" like this.
Federal prosecutors charged Matanov for destroying records under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law enacted by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal.
Prosecutors are able to apply the law broadly because they do not have to show that the person deleting evidence knew there was an investigation underway. In other words, a person could theoretically be charged under Sarbanes-Oxley for deleting her dealer's number from her phone even if she were unaware that the feds were getting a search warrant to find her marijuana.
It looks like one more tumble down the slippery slope, to me!
The guy recognised the brothers when their faces appeared on TV. He went to the police and told them about it. But he wasn't entirely accurate in what he said, and when he got back, he cleared his browsing history.
A year later he was charged with...... deleting evidence. But not of any other actual crime.
So this seems to fall pretty clearly in the "uh oh" category. Apparently now if you even attempt to help police yourself, you are no longer allowed to delete your browser history or presumably any other file from that point forward? He could have had dozens of reasons to delete his browser history.
Yeah, that goes without saying. But is it so essential to them to count likes, that they're willing to initiate legal action over it? Surely that should be the last resort.
The rules say you do paperwork for deposits of over $10k. So why should they do it for $9k deposits?
Additionally, when the US government thinks you may be structuring, it doesn't simply say "please fill out this form". It tends to just seize the money.
Yes. That's why the solution to their problem is called "running your own website". Suing Facebook to deliberately drop them between a rock and a hard place is an asshat move that will accomplish nothing except making lawyers a bit richer.
Ye gods. Are these people really incapable of hiring a web designer?
If Hastert had done the reporting, he wouldn't be in deep crap at this point, his secrets intact for better and worse. The reporting has a purpose: keep large transfers from skirting reporting in taxes.... like taking your annual profits to a tax haven, and so forth.
That's not quite how structuring works.
The rules say you must file paperwork if you do a cash transaction of over $10k (or it might be less these days, the regulations change constantly).
As nobody likes paperwork, it was thus quickly observed that people who had, say, $30k they wanted to withdraw would simply withdraw less than $10k for four days, and thus avoid triggering the reporting requirements.
Their "solution" to this was to invent the crime of structuring, which is doing financial transactions to try and avoid the reporting requirements.
The problem here should be obvious. The law set a limit beyond which you are supposed to do something. Then another law said avoiding the limit is a crime. So what's the real limit? Answer: whatever the government feels like. What happens if you have a business that happens to generate about $9000 in cash per day, and you deposit it every day? Well, sucks to be you. You might be accused of structuring, and how would you defend yourself? You cannot prove your own innocence!
Was this guy Hastert guilty of structuring? Hard to say - wanting to reduce red tape in your life is not supposed to be a crime, but in this case it is, so perhaps he is a criminal. Or perhaps not. It's entirely subjective.
The real fix would have been to eliminate the limit and require reporting of all cash transactions, but as that's absurdly impractical they came up with this cludge only a politician could be proud of. For people like us here on Slashdot, many of whom work with software and thus must think very clearly all day, these sorts of laws seem crazy. Figure out what the heck you actually want, government! It's not the fault of random bystanders if you can't figure out what you want and then criminals take advantage of that!
How is this a hard problem? The Spideroak cloud storage service does this; uploaded files are encrypted before they leave your machine. Even the file names are secret; the servers have zero knowledge of the file's name or type or contents.
Services like SpiderOak sacrifice features people want, in order to get that. For instance, no search. No web preview or editing. Clunky sharing. No password recovery if you forget.
Still, I was mostly thinking about other services. If you look at some of the features Google Photos has like being able to do text search for untagged photos using image recognition, there's no technical way to do that in a blind manner right now.
The advantage Apple has is that they don't rely on advertising for any significant part of their revenue.
That's the theory Apple is peddling. It doesn't match up very well with reality though.
Firstly, don't get me wrong, I love Tim Cook's stance. I love that Apple is pushing encryption. I don't want to see them stop. But Silicon Valley needs to move as one here, and this sort of competitive sniping isn't really helping.
The only product Apple has that's actually end to end encrypted is iMessages. But WhatsApp is also encrypted in the same way, and that's owned by Facebook, which makes its money by advertising. So much for that theory.
All the other cloud products Apple has work in exactly the same way as their competitors do: you upload unencrypted documents to Apple, who then store and process them for you. And this is a technological constraint, not a business model constraint. Keeping servers fully blind as to the data they're working with is an open field of academic research. It's not something that Google or Facebook or Twitter or DropBox or whoever are holding back from because they hate privacy. It's just a really hard problem.
And finally Apple does of course have an advertising product. It has iAds. That has not been a successful product for them, but it's not for lack of trying.
So when you actually examine the details of Apple's products, you see that they're not really any different to what their competitors are doing. Cook's statements sound good to the non-expert listener, but it's just marketing.
What's more, there's a rather problematic assumption underlying Cook's position. Apple indeed makes most of its money from the extremely fat margins it makes from iPhone buyers, who consistently pay way over the odds for what they're getting. But it's only possible for Apple to subsidise its cloud offerings via fat hardware margins because Apple ignores the low end of the market. Indeed, given their attempts to destroy Android, it's fair to say Apple not only ignores the low end but would be quite happy if people too poor to buy an iPhone had no smartphone technology at all. Advertising as a business model may not be perfect but it's the reason that people in Africa can buy smartphones for $30 and use services like Google Maps, Search, Photos, etc. People who live outside affluent countries matter too.
I posted specific examples so that people could discuss the issues and point out problems with the conclusion. Several, in fact.
None of your examples support your thesis. I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for 15 years. People posting "an opinion that's not *quite* right just to get people to respond" is pretty much the lifeblood of Slashdot, how else would you test out ideas and discover they were wrong? Heck, in another story I'm getting my ass kicked right now because I didn't know that light American aircraft had registration numbers visible from the ground. Other posters are setting me straight. Yet I do not work for some shadowy organisation.
Your other examples are equally bizarre. People posting that they think the Paul's have a few good ideas and lots of crazy ones? That's not an organised conspiracy, that's just..... a common viewpoint! One that was even mocked and made fun of in the last story about Rand Paul I remember reading.
You took the most vulnerable example and framed it in a "conspiracy theorist" context, and used it to frame the entire position. That's fine, it's a good use of rhetoric, but it adds nothing new to the conversation other than "in my opinion...".
You're the one using rhetoric! I didn't take "the most vulnerable example", I picked one at random because they're all equally ridiculous. Why exactly would any government or paid trolling operation even care about Uber?
And yes, if it's not clear, my reply said in my opinion you are sounding kind of crazy and appear to be giving in to paranoid delusions. Your position is: they don't disagree with me because they think I'm wrong. They disagree with me because there's a vast shadowy conspiracy to undermine me, Okian Warrior, and my world view, using subtle powers of rhetoric!
Occam's Razor says that, maybe, Uber is controversial and politicians like the Paul's tend to have many different views, with which few if any people agree completely.
Because looking at the chemical plant explosion hoax [wikipedia.org] and Acorn hoax [wikipedia.org] would indicate ro me that sock puppets can have an enormous negative effect on public opinion and government policy
What change to government policy did the chemical plant hoax bring about, exactly? And what effect on public opinion? Your link provides no backing for this assertion. It seems like the hoax was nothing more than a bizarre timewaste, given the triviality of phoning the chemical plant and discovering it was not on fire.
If you really can't see why "be careful of sock puppets" is damaging, just go browse further down this thread. There's an example of a guy who says he is Russian asking for evidence that Russia shot down the jet liner. And literally EVERY reply except mine is on the lines of, "go away paid Putin troll". That kind of thing shuts down debate and closes people's minds.
What's more - there's nothing you can do about it. So what if some people are being paid to post to Slashdot? What's the worst they can do, exactly? Say things you don't like to hear?
Yes, see, the moderation and replies to this post are quite disturbing.
This troubles me greatly. Internet debate is being shut down on the internet, but not by paid Russian trolls. I have yet to see proof of such things happening on Slashdot, and the article itself largely draws blanks with regards to English-language interference.
Debate is being shut down by an army of people who automatically assume any position they disagree with w.r.t Russia is held by "non people" and therefore anything they say can be safely ignored. It's basically a modern witchhunt - your opinions look funny to me, so you must be a witch! Burn them! Evidence? We don't need none of that, just look at those opinions!
Given the fairly direct path between "westerners demonizing Russia" and "war" this is one of the most disturbing things I've seen on the internet in years. Now is the time for people to use the internet to talk to each other and understand each others viewpoints. Instead people in the west are simply sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "LA LA LA PUTIN TROLL CAN'T HEAR YOU".
Fuck, you know what? As far as I'm concerned, even if there are people being paid to post Putin's views on Slashdot - bring it on! Our media doesn't even try to tell the Russian side of the story, and as the Slashdot poll disclaimer says, you shouldn't be making decisions based on internet popularity contests anyway. I'll evaluate things I read for myself and so should everyone else.
Er, I think what you are observing is just called debate. People disagree with you about Uber? No conspiracy theory needed for that - perhaps your views about what other people think just aren't as accurate as you had believed. Rand Paul? Likewise.
There have been delusional people with nonsensical arguments on the internet since the internet was invented. As with terrorism, this recent rise of "you disagree with me thus you must be a secret government paid sockpuppet" is by far more damaging than anything paid trolls could actually do by themselves. It ends debate and closes people's minds. They can rest easy without having to be troubled by arguments that suggest they may be wrong, because ZOMG RUSSIA! Where by $RUSSIA you can of course substitute almost any government, as if there's one thing Snowden showed us it's that the idea of western exceptionalism on the internet is pretty naive.
Greece is running a primary surplus right now. So try again
Um, according to their own figures which are highly dubious they were, but now are not anymore. And whilst a primary surplus is an interesting metric, you can't simply ignore debt. It's not ignorable. What they actually have is a massive deficit they cannot fix.
Spain and Ireland were running large surpluses when the crisis hit.
Bear in mind that there was a lot of lending from bad banks which was then taxed.
Says you. Meanwhile here, in the real world big state countries like Canada, France and Germany seem to sustain their debts without problems. Yes creditors asked for a smaller state. What else is news? Yet their interest rates are extremely low, which shows that at the end of the day said creditors are happy with the status quo.
As I pointed out already Germany is paying off its debts, it has a real budget surplus. Other EU countries have low interest rates because the ECB is more or less outright funding them at this point: it's not a real market when one of the biggest players can create their own money.
Not really. Spoken like somebody who had crap teachers. Back in times of yore when people were still using the transmission model that might have been workable. But, it's a good example of being penny wise and pound foolish.
What kind of utopia did you grow up in? I'm 31 and 90% of my teaching at high school and university could best be described as "transmission". Long lessons full of note taking, reading the textbooks, and then if we got lucky we'd get to duplicate some practical work the teacher just showed us. Yes, sometimes you got individual assistance if you were falling behind. And sometimes you didn't. It was ridiculously high stress and a generally crappy way to teach people. That was in the UK. University was even worse: same style of teaching, minus the actual love of it that many of my high school teachers did at least have.
I do not believe schools have changed significantly in the last 15 years. Vast majority of the work teachers were doing could be replaced by high quality optimised lectures a la Khan Academy, automated question setting/marking, plus in-class supervisors (basically the nannys OP mentioned), plus on demand assistance from pools of remote teachers in cheaper countries.
Not this again. The truth is there has been NO ADVANCES in AI since the 1970's. NONE.
lol. Google disagrees with you. They saw the word error rate on their voice recognition drop to near-human levels of accuracy due to the deployment of deep neural nets. DNNs were NOT available in the 1970's by the way. The concept of a neural net was, but nobody knew how to build one that worked like they do today. Obviously "learning how to build something that was previously impossible" is an advance under any reasonable definition.
In real life, as opposed to in your head, evidence suggests that to the contrary, what is better for everyone is a rather expansive state. To wit, in most indicators, including wealth, large state countries such as western Europe, Canada and Japan are at least comparable and often better than the USA, while small state countries such as Somalia or Haiti are much below
By that logic Greece should be paradise.
Right now most big, rich, western countries with high quality of life are supporting themselves either via oil or via debt. That is not sustainable, which is why many European countries are either significantly cutting back the state or being told they really need to by various creditors. Balanced budgets as in Germany are sustainable, but Germany is also a fair bit poorer than people realise: wages have hardly gone up there for many years.
If you're the sort of person who believes any and all business is merely a way to make profit and nobody who creates a company ever actually cares about the task they perform, then sure. Reality is more complex than that.
Re: China. iOS is in the minority in China. Even at the time of the iPhone 6 launch iOS market share was only 20%, but iOS market share always spikes around the time of a new iPhone launch, then falls back down in the other quarters. And China is a special case - Google isn't willing to play ball with the communist government so the services that make Android most useful are all blocked there. Apple cooperates so they can sell iOS as is, getting a built-in advantage. Despite this, Android still dominates.
From their perspective it'd be much worse than higher search rev shares. If Android did not exist, Google Maps would have been wiped out overnight on mobile when Apple decided to go it alone (against the wishes of their own userbase, no less). Android was never about making direct profit, it was always about ensuring Google was able to deliver their services directly to users. They were quite open about this from the start. And judged by this standard it has been an incredible, epic success.
iOS is on the way down anyway. Outside of English speaking countries and Japan it's in the minority everywhere. In some countries, especially European countries like Germany and Spain, the iPhone has been crushed.
These career govt employees feed info to the pres, make recommendations, and fight for their interests. Even if a new pres wants to turn on a dime, Washington DC is a large ship that turns slowly.
Bingo. The old UK comedy "Yes Prime Minister" was a rather cutting illustration of this phenomenon at work.
What happens to someone when they become the prez? Enormous numbers of apparently experienced people begin telling you all kinds of secret things. They stress the importance of secrecy. They tell you about this plot or that plot. They say it's vital they get new powers and they not-so-subtly imply that if you don't help them Women And Children will DIE! And although it's left unstated you know perfectly well that if you don't give them what they want, you will see leaks in the press from anonymous officials that paint you as a prevaricator, as weak, as unconcerned for the lives of Patriotic Heroes And Their Women And Children.
The problem any US President has, and I daresay many other countries presidents, is that they are immediately submerged into a fantasy world woven from the agendas of the people around them mixed with their own pre-existing views, and those people are themselves also in a slightly less extreme form of a personal fantasy world and so on all the way down. A toxic brew of patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, militarism and most of all pervasive classification means that it's impossible for a prez to penetrate the fog of misinformation that surrounds them. They can be manipulated into believing nearly anything because it would take an incredibly strong willed personality to say directly to the senior bureaucrats feeding them classified intelligence, "I think you are bullshitting me and I am going to personally audit your shit and prosecute you if you're lying to me".
Obama is very much NOT a strong willed personality. He sees himself primarily as a reasonable man who finds compromise between different factions. This makes him easily manipulated: all it takes is for people who agree to present him two apparently opposed positions - one extreme and one very extreme - and Obama will reliably pick something that is quite extreme. And the officials around him know that.
In hindsight it should have been obvious. Obama has no real track record of achievement in politics. He supported no particularly controversial positions, or showed any particularly clear thinking. Compared to Bush he seemed like a genius of course but Bush was a fucking man child, so that wasn't hard.
For that reason, Rand Paul fans might be disappointed if he won. I don't expect he would be able to accomplish as much change as people would like.
Almost certainly not. But it looks like Rand Paul is made of stronger stuff than Obama. Paul consistently argues for positions that piss off most of his party. He seems able to come to conclusions about things himself regardless of what other people believe. He seems to have fairly strong principles. He doesn't come across as the sort of wishy-washy people person that Obama is. If there's any US politician that actually might tell the people in his secret briefings "stop bullshitting me or I fire you", it's probably Rand Paul.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry having fully read the report now I'm gonna guess that Duqu is more likely to be Israeli intelligence than the NSA. The report notes that at least one victim has been hacked by the "Equation Group" (very clearly NSA) and Duqu at the same time. Additionally the target list is things like anything to do with the Iranian nuclear program (very interesting to the Israelis) and also something to do with an anniversary of an event related to Auschwitz? Doesn't seem likely to interest the Americans. And apparently the few unfaked timestamps that remain are GMT+2 or GMT+3, the developers work on January 1st, and there's at least one English spelling mistake in the code.
Additionally, Duqu and Stuxnet are apparently somehow related but not quite the same thing, and we know from leaks by US officials wanting to take credit that Stuxnet was a US/Israeli collaboration.
Come up how? Who the hell cares about hacking an anti-virus company except intelligence agencies anyway? They, at least for now it seems, aren't in the business of blackmailing companies in ways that could only lead directly back to them.
No way! This can only help their image, not hurt it.
Look. This attack speaks to the idiocy and hubris of whichever intelligence agency is behind Duqu (probably the NSA, iirc). Kaspersky have repeatedly revealed western intelligence malware; they are not idiots, as anyone who reads their reports can attest. Indeed they've done massively more than any other AV company in the business. The people who thought it was a good idea to attack a company staffed by some of the best reverse engineers in the industry must be crazy: they just burned three zero days ..... for what? To get a sneak preview of upcoming products? Those must be some mighty scary products!
What sort of message does this send to anyone outside the USA? It says that Kaspersky AV is so frickin' badass that the world's best funded intelligence agencies tried to spy on it ..... and failed. It says that Kaspersky, being Russian, doesn't give a shit about being prosecuted by the US government and will happily add NSA malware to their AV product scans, it reinforces their image of being in the lead when it comes to analysing state-sponsored malware, it reveals a strong commitment to transparency (they could have said nothing), and it says "if you think you may be targeted by government attackers, you can't do better than buy Kaspersky AV".
I think this is a genius move by them.
Whilst I don't disagree that academic languages rarely get used directly in industry, one of the world's most successful industrial programming languages is Java, and Java is interpreted, JVM based, and in version 8 got things like functional streams and lambda functions. Still no help with immutability, but value types will partly address that.
So choosing these features as examples of stuff that's irrelevant to large scale industrial systems seems particularly perverse.
The article claims that since Sarbanes-Oxley this statement is no longer true: destruction of records can be a crime even if you had no idea there was an investigation taking place.
This sounds absurd but there are other US laws that turn people into "accidental criminals" like this.
Apparently not:
It looks like one more tumble down the slippery slope, to me!
It says in TFA the order of what happened.
The guy recognised the brothers when their faces appeared on TV. He went to the police and told them about it. But he wasn't entirely accurate in what he said, and when he got back, he cleared his browsing history.
A year later he was charged with ...... deleting evidence. But not of any other actual crime.
So this seems to fall pretty clearly in the "uh oh" category. Apparently now if you even attempt to help police yourself, you are no longer allowed to delete your browser history or presumably any other file from that point forward? He could have had dozens of reasons to delete his browser history.
Yeah, that goes without saying. But is it so essential to them to count likes, that they're willing to initiate legal action over it? Surely that should be the last resort.
I guess I'm not making it clear.
The rules say you do paperwork for deposits of over $10k. So why should they do it for $9k deposits?
Additionally, when the US government thinks you may be structuring, it doesn't simply say "please fill out this form". It tends to just seize the money.
Yes. That's why the solution to their problem is called "running your own website". Suing Facebook to deliberately drop them between a rock and a hard place is an asshat move that will accomplish nothing except making lawyers a bit richer.
Ye gods. Are these people really incapable of hiring a web designer?
That's not quite how structuring works.
The rules say you must file paperwork if you do a cash transaction of over $10k (or it might be less these days, the regulations change constantly).
As nobody likes paperwork, it was thus quickly observed that people who had, say, $30k they wanted to withdraw would simply withdraw less than $10k for four days, and thus avoid triggering the reporting requirements.
Their "solution" to this was to invent the crime of structuring, which is doing financial transactions to try and avoid the reporting requirements.
The problem here should be obvious. The law set a limit beyond which you are supposed to do something. Then another law said avoiding the limit is a crime. So what's the real limit? Answer: whatever the government feels like. What happens if you have a business that happens to generate about $9000 in cash per day, and you deposit it every day? Well, sucks to be you. You might be accused of structuring, and how would you defend yourself? You cannot prove your own innocence!
Was this guy Hastert guilty of structuring? Hard to say - wanting to reduce red tape in your life is not supposed to be a crime, but in this case it is, so perhaps he is a criminal. Or perhaps not. It's entirely subjective.
The real fix would have been to eliminate the limit and require reporting of all cash transactions, but as that's absurdly impractical they came up with this cludge only a politician could be proud of. For people like us here on Slashdot, many of whom work with software and thus must think very clearly all day, these sorts of laws seem crazy. Figure out what the heck you actually want, government! It's not the fault of random bystanders if you can't figure out what you want and then criminals take advantage of that!
I agree with you. From my post ....
Services like SpiderOak sacrifice features people want, in order to get that. For instance, no search. No web preview or editing. Clunky sharing. No password recovery if you forget.
Still, I was mostly thinking about other services. If you look at some of the features Google Photos has like being able to do text search for untagged photos using image recognition, there's no technical way to do that in a blind manner right now.
That's the theory Apple is peddling. It doesn't match up very well with reality though.
Firstly, don't get me wrong, I love Tim Cook's stance. I love that Apple is pushing encryption. I don't want to see them stop. But Silicon Valley needs to move as one here, and this sort of competitive sniping isn't really helping.
The only product Apple has that's actually end to end encrypted is iMessages. But WhatsApp is also encrypted in the same way, and that's owned by Facebook, which makes its money by advertising. So much for that theory.
All the other cloud products Apple has work in exactly the same way as their competitors do: you upload unencrypted documents to Apple, who then store and process them for you. And this is a technological constraint, not a business model constraint. Keeping servers fully blind as to the data they're working with is an open field of academic research. It's not something that Google or Facebook or Twitter or DropBox or whoever are holding back from because they hate privacy. It's just a really hard problem.
And finally Apple does of course have an advertising product. It has iAds. That has not been a successful product for them, but it's not for lack of trying.
So when you actually examine the details of Apple's products, you see that they're not really any different to what their competitors are doing. Cook's statements sound good to the non-expert listener, but it's just marketing.
What's more, there's a rather problematic assumption underlying Cook's position. Apple indeed makes most of its money from the extremely fat margins it makes from iPhone buyers, who consistently pay way over the odds for what they're getting. But it's only possible for Apple to subsidise its cloud offerings via fat hardware margins because Apple ignores the low end of the market. Indeed, given their attempts to destroy Android, it's fair to say Apple not only ignores the low end but would be quite happy if people too poor to buy an iPhone had no smartphone technology at all. Advertising as a business model may not be perfect but it's the reason that people in Africa can buy smartphones for $30 and use services like Google Maps, Search, Photos, etc. People who live outside affluent countries matter too.
Fair points. I didn't know you could see registration numbers from the ground.
None of your examples support your thesis. I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for 15 years. People posting "an opinion that's not *quite* right just to get people to respond" is pretty much the lifeblood of Slashdot, how else would you test out ideas and discover they were wrong? Heck, in another story I'm getting my ass kicked right now because I didn't know that light American aircraft had registration numbers visible from the ground. Other posters are setting me straight. Yet I do not work for some shadowy organisation.
Your other examples are equally bizarre. People posting that they think the Paul's have a few good ideas and lots of crazy ones? That's not an organised conspiracy, that's just ..... a common viewpoint! One that was even mocked and made fun of in the last story about Rand Paul I remember reading.
You're the one using rhetoric! I didn't take "the most vulnerable example", I picked one at random because they're all equally ridiculous. Why exactly would any government or paid trolling operation even care about Uber?
And yes, if it's not clear, my reply said in my opinion you are sounding kind of crazy and appear to be giving in to paranoid delusions. Your position is: they don't disagree with me because they think I'm wrong. They disagree with me because there's a vast shadowy conspiracy to undermine me, Okian Warrior, and my world view, using subtle powers of rhetoric!
Occam's Razor says that, maybe, Uber is controversial and politicians like the Paul's tend to have many different views, with which few if any people agree completely.
What change to government policy did the chemical plant hoax bring about, exactly? And what effect on public opinion? Your link provides no backing for this assertion. It seems like the hoax was nothing more than a bizarre timewaste, given the triviality of phoning the chemical plant and discovering it was not on fire.
If you really can't see why "be careful of sock puppets" is damaging, just go browse further down this thread. There's an example of a guy who says he is Russian asking for evidence that Russia shot down the jet liner. And literally EVERY reply except mine is on the lines of, "go away paid Putin troll". That kind of thing shuts down debate and closes people's minds.
What's more - there's nothing you can do about it. So what if some people are being paid to post to Slashdot? What's the worst they can do, exactly? Say things you don't like to hear?
Hide their association from who, exactly? Air traffic control? It's not like you can see who registered a plane from the ground.
This statement just screams "we are breaking the rules and don't want to get caught"
Yes, see, the moderation and replies to this post are quite disturbing.
This troubles me greatly. Internet debate is being shut down on the internet, but not by paid Russian trolls. I have yet to see proof of such things happening on Slashdot, and the article itself largely draws blanks with regards to English-language interference.
Debate is being shut down by an army of people who automatically assume any position they disagree with w.r.t Russia is held by "non people" and therefore anything they say can be safely ignored. It's basically a modern witchhunt - your opinions look funny to me, so you must be a witch! Burn them! Evidence? We don't need none of that, just look at those opinions!
Given the fairly direct path between "westerners demonizing Russia" and "war" this is one of the most disturbing things I've seen on the internet in years. Now is the time for people to use the internet to talk to each other and understand each others viewpoints. Instead people in the west are simply sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "LA LA LA PUTIN TROLL CAN'T HEAR YOU".
Fuck, you know what? As far as I'm concerned, even if there are people being paid to post Putin's views on Slashdot - bring it on! Our media doesn't even try to tell the Russian side of the story, and as the Slashdot poll disclaimer says, you shouldn't be making decisions based on internet popularity contests anyway. I'll evaluate things I read for myself and so should everyone else.
Er, I think what you are observing is just called debate. People disagree with you about Uber? No conspiracy theory needed for that - perhaps your views about what other people think just aren't as accurate as you had believed. Rand Paul? Likewise.
There have been delusional people with nonsensical arguments on the internet since the internet was invented. As with terrorism, this recent rise of "you disagree with me thus you must be a secret government paid sockpuppet" is by far more damaging than anything paid trolls could actually do by themselves. It ends debate and closes people's minds. They can rest easy without having to be troubled by arguments that suggest they may be wrong, because ZOMG RUSSIA! Where by $RUSSIA you can of course substitute almost any government, as if there's one thing Snowden showed us it's that the idea of western exceptionalism on the internet is pretty naive.
Um, according to their own figures which are highly dubious they were, but now are not anymore. And whilst a primary surplus is an interesting metric, you can't simply ignore debt. It's not ignorable. What they actually have is a massive deficit they cannot fix.
Bear in mind that there was a lot of lending from bad banks which was then taxed.
As I pointed out already Germany is paying off its debts, it has a real budget surplus. Other EU countries have low interest rates because the ECB is more or less outright funding them at this point: it's not a real market when one of the biggest players can create their own money.
What kind of utopia did you grow up in? I'm 31 and 90% of my teaching at high school and university could best be described as "transmission". Long lessons full of note taking, reading the textbooks, and then if we got lucky we'd get to duplicate some practical work the teacher just showed us. Yes, sometimes you got individual assistance if you were falling behind. And sometimes you didn't. It was ridiculously high stress and a generally crappy way to teach people. That was in the UK. University was even worse: same style of teaching, minus the actual love of it that many of my high school teachers did at least have.
I do not believe schools have changed significantly in the last 15 years. Vast majority of the work teachers were doing could be replaced by high quality optimised lectures a la Khan Academy, automated question setting/marking, plus in-class supervisors (basically the nannys OP mentioned), plus on demand assistance from pools of remote teachers in cheaper countries.
lol. Google disagrees with you. They saw the word error rate on their voice recognition drop to near-human levels of accuracy due to the deployment of deep neural nets. DNNs were NOT available in the 1970's by the way. The concept of a neural net was, but nobody knew how to build one that worked like they do today. Obviously "learning how to build something that was previously impossible" is an advance under any reasonable definition.
By that logic Greece should be paradise.
Right now most big, rich, western countries with high quality of life are supporting themselves either via oil or via debt. That is not sustainable, which is why many European countries are either significantly cutting back the state or being told they really need to by various creditors. Balanced budgets as in Germany are sustainable, but Germany is also a fair bit poorer than people realise: wages have hardly gone up there for many years.
If you're the sort of person who believes any and all business is merely a way to make profit and nobody who creates a company ever actually cares about the task they perform, then sure. Reality is more complex than that.
Re: China. iOS is in the minority in China. Even at the time of the iPhone 6 launch iOS market share was only 20%, but iOS market share always spikes around the time of a new iPhone launch, then falls back down in the other quarters. And China is a special case - Google isn't willing to play ball with the communist government so the services that make Android most useful are all blocked there. Apple cooperates so they can sell iOS as is, getting a built-in advantage. Despite this, Android still dominates.
From their perspective it'd be much worse than higher search rev shares. If Android did not exist, Google Maps would have been wiped out overnight on mobile when Apple decided to go it alone (against the wishes of their own userbase, no less). Android was never about making direct profit, it was always about ensuring Google was able to deliver their services directly to users. They were quite open about this from the start. And judged by this standard it has been an incredible, epic success.
iOS is on the way down anyway. Outside of English speaking countries and Japan it's in the minority everywhere. In some countries, especially European countries like Germany and Spain, the iPhone has been crushed.
Bingo. The old UK comedy "Yes Prime Minister" was a rather cutting illustration of this phenomenon at work.
What happens to someone when they become the prez? Enormous numbers of apparently experienced people begin telling you all kinds of secret things. They stress the importance of secrecy. They tell you about this plot or that plot. They say it's vital they get new powers and they not-so-subtly imply that if you don't help them Women And Children will DIE! And although it's left unstated you know perfectly well that if you don't give them what they want, you will see leaks in the press from anonymous officials that paint you as a prevaricator, as weak, as unconcerned for the lives of Patriotic Heroes And Their Women And Children.
The problem any US President has, and I daresay many other countries presidents, is that they are immediately submerged into a fantasy world woven from the agendas of the people around them mixed with their own pre-existing views, and those people are themselves also in a slightly less extreme form of a personal fantasy world and so on all the way down. A toxic brew of patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, militarism and most of all pervasive classification means that it's impossible for a prez to penetrate the fog of misinformation that surrounds them. They can be manipulated into believing nearly anything because it would take an incredibly strong willed personality to say directly to the senior bureaucrats feeding them classified intelligence, "I think you are bullshitting me and I am going to personally audit your shit and prosecute you if you're lying to me".
Obama is very much NOT a strong willed personality. He sees himself primarily as a reasonable man who finds compromise between different factions. This makes him easily manipulated: all it takes is for people who agree to present him two apparently opposed positions - one extreme and one very extreme - and Obama will reliably pick something that is quite extreme. And the officials around him know that.
In hindsight it should have been obvious. Obama has no real track record of achievement in politics. He supported no particularly controversial positions, or showed any particularly clear thinking. Compared to Bush he seemed like a genius of course but Bush was a fucking man child, so that wasn't hard.
Almost certainly not. But it looks like Rand Paul is made of stronger stuff than Obama. Paul consistently argues for positions that piss off most of his party. He seems able to come to conclusions about things himself regardless of what other people believe. He seems to have fairly strong principles. He doesn't come across as the sort of wishy-washy people person that Obama is. If there's any US politician that actually might tell the people in his secret briefings "stop bullshitting me or I fire you", it's probably Rand Paul.