Web hosts and registrars are now the de facto controllers of mass publication. They have greater ability to censor unwanted speech than any government. It's scary how this has become common place, and all that happens in response is an over-intellectualised debate between "it's censorship" and "it's not censorship because it's not government" and "it's their house so it's their rules".
We've arrived in an era when large companies can censor unwanted voices, and all that happens is it becomes a talking point for a day or two and then is forgotten about.
I wish we could hear from people who have actually gone to war to defend our right to free speech. I wonder how supportive they are of Google and GoDaddy deciding who's allowed to talk?
I found a similar flaw in a supermarket's self-service tills. Didn't report it for this very reason. I don't purposefully look for bugs/exploits, but if I did spot any more in future then I wouldn't report those either. My heart tells me to report them, but my head tells me no.
If cinemas would do something about other people talking during movies then we'd go again. But they won't, so now we never go. The last 3 or 4 films we saw, we had to walk out partway through and get a refund. So we just don't bother anymore.
Just to say, I enjoyed it. I especially liked the structure, which focused on the main law suit, before introducing the Thiel issue, and then moving on to discuss other issues. It packaged up a multi-layered story in a neat, easily-digestible bundle.
* Go to the search tab in the mobile twitter app. The search bar is hidden by default and you have to scroll up and click on it.
* Media player on PS4. Fast forward and rewind buttons go at an insane speed, i.e. you can skip through an entire film in a couple of seconds. There are YEARS of forum posts complaining about it.
* Pretty much everything on iCloud is broken and has been for years. Handoff, Airdrop and iMessage sometimes work, sometimes don't, and if you can't rely on something then it's useless. Apple support forums are full of workarounds but the faults are never fixed.
* Unity. So many broken features, never fixed. The latest release carried a huge list of impressive new features, but was greeted by hundreds of "will you ever fix XYZ" comments. The dirty secret of Unity development is that it's great for prototyping, but you need to custom write everything that matters. Right down to basic stuff like vector maths.
* Steam. For some games it asks your date of birth, which is remembered between sessions so you can just click ok. But occasionally it forgets, and if you click ok with the wrong date set then you can't access that game... ever. If you try to access it again then it says you're underage, with no option to enter the correct date.
The incident in the photos brought about the immediate collapse of a trial, and an arrest, potentially leading to another trial. Publishing the photos would have been contempt of court.
In the 30+ years that I've been using computers, I've had 4 viruses. Two of them came through Adobe exploits. (Both were served by web ads on mainstream sites, which downloaded and auto-opened PDF files which in turn deployed and opened executables.)
I'm so sick of most torrent sites nowadays. There's one I still use, an ExtraTorrent proxy, that is just about tolerable, but every other site I've tried over the past year is full of popups, popunders, redirects, etc. I've got popups blocked, adverts blocked, everything blocked that I know how to block, and still the sites are practically unusable.
When I read this story, just out of interest I went to the https version of the pirate bay to see if it worked. Clicked on the search box and immediately I had a full-screen popup, two smaller popups, and a text-to-speech reader (ffs!!) reading out a warning message about my system having been compromised and giving me a phone number to call.
Will newspapers die? Hopefully not. Are they dying right now? Yes.
Or, more accurately, they're being killed from within. What you have to remember is that newspapers aren't run by journalists, they're run by managers and salesmen who don't seem to understand their target market (readers) or their product (quality reporting). They don't seem to look further than the next issue -- if that hits the streets then great, job done. Who cares how it's achieved.
Here in the UK, so many quality journalists and photographers are being let go because managers see staff as an expendable resource. Got 20 journalists working their arses off to produce the paper? Cool, sack 10 of them and use agency copy. The public will never notice, right? That's £200,000 saved per year. When the readership halves because of rubbish content, we'll dream up some other excuse to explain that away. And then we'll sack more staff. Never the managers. They're not expendable. Always the journalists.
I'll give you an insight in to where the power lies at newspapers. About 2 years ago I was working at a great bi-weekly city newspaper. We were working on a story for the next day's paper and I went over to talk to the news editor. He told me that there might not be space to run the story anymore, because four news pages had been dropped. Why? Because the paper liked to have a 50/50 split between editorial and adverts. The ad sales team had sold a full four pages less adverts than they were meant to. So to make everything look right with the upper management, the manager of the ad sales team simply had four news pages dropped.
It wasn't like we were short-staffed that week or there had been a shortage of stories. The news was written, the photos had been taken, the pages were being made up. And four pages were wiped out, just like that, to make one sales guy look good.
Ask anyone who works in newspapers if they've ever heard of the editorial team having ad pages dropped to make space for news. Go on, have a guess how often that happens.
tl;dr: Newspaper sales are dropping. Managers try to save money by making the newspapers worse. Sales drop further. And so on.
Ridiculous. Having lots of bad journalism is not the same as having no quality journalism. We've always had quality journalism, and we still do, just less and less because people are decreasingly willing to pay.
If he did make out with the teacher then I'm on his side because he should be free to tell the truth. If he didn't make out with the teacher then I'm on everyone else's side because he lied in a way that could ruin her career.
I was born and lived in Yorkshire, England for 20 years, a place that has a light-hearted reputation for being tight with money. A couple of years ago my girlfriend and I went on a road trip and visited Yorkshire. We had breakfast in a cafe where I plugged in my phone. The owner came over and started talking about how we were putting him out of business and electricity isn't cheap etc. We thought he was joking at first. But then he asked us for 50p to cover the cost of the electric. He was serious.
I'm struggling to think of any company that I trust less than Google. I mean, I don't really "trust" any company, but with Google I specifically distrust them. Anyone who has had to deal with their various press offices around the world will have sensed that there's something creepily wrong with that company. The whole operation screams "go away".
I do wonder why this happens. I've always had the vague explanation in my head that the OS gets clogged up with files that it has to catalogue, parse, etc, but I suspect it's not that simple.
When I switched full-time to Macs about 2 years ago I thought it would be great that I'd never again have to put up with my OS slowing down. But sure enough, it did, and every 6 months or so I have to blank my Mac and reinstall. Which to be honest I don't mind doing because it's super-easy on a Mac, and I like knowing that my system is clean again.
Although curse you Apple the last install has left me with a weird issue whereby every time I boot the machine OSX asks me to verify the iCloud keychain from another device. I've done this maybe a dozen times now and have finally given up. I've had to accept that until I reinstall OSX, for some reason I'm going to get the keychain nag every time I boot up. But pretty much everything on iOS/OSX is broken at the moment so no big surprise.
I blanked my Mac a few weeks ago and when I started reinstalling software I got some survey crap popping up on my screen asking for my details. Turns out it was the SourceForge installer for FileZilla that had sneaked it through. Googling it threw up enough horror stories to make me just blank the Mac again and start over. I'll never download anything from SourceForge again. A decade of trust destroyed in one stupid move.
I totally take on board what you're saying about the scoring system, but I still think it's evident that the judge's personal opinions influenced the sentencing. Consider this quote from the Wired article:
But in her sentencing statement, Forrest denied even that the Silk Road was a naive experiment, or some sort of youthful mistake. "It was a carefully planned life's work. It was your opus," she said. "You wanted it to be your legacy. And it is."
None of that is fact. It's what the judge *thinks* is fact. Suppose her opinion had been that Silk Road was a naive, youthful experiment, something that he'd just thrown together and then it snowballed, something that he wasn't proud of. Would she really have handed down the harshest possible sentence? I think she'd have found some justification to give him a lighter sentence.
Maybe I'm just getting more empathetic as I get older. I've never done anything illegal but I've sure done stupid things, as we all have, and losing the rest of your life because you were a dick in your early 30s seems almost inhumane to me. Most of us do stupid stuff and then we move on and learn from our own stupidity. This guy deserves to lose some of his liberty because his stupidity was illegal, but his entire life? I just can't convince myself that this is how I want my fellow humans to be treated.
Slashdot Mirror
Web hosts and registrars are now the de facto controllers of mass publication. They have greater ability to censor unwanted speech than any government. It's scary how this has become common place, and all that happens in response is an over-intellectualised debate between "it's censorship" and "it's not censorship because it's not government" and "it's their house so it's their rules".
We've arrived in an era when large companies can censor unwanted voices, and all that happens is it becomes a talking point for a day or two and then is forgotten about.
I wish we could hear from people who have actually gone to war to defend our right to free speech. I wonder how supportive they are of Google and GoDaddy deciding who's allowed to talk?
I mean witness protection.
Why would a transport agency have any access to witness relocation data?
I found a similar flaw in a supermarket's self-service tills. Didn't report it for this very reason. I don't purposefully look for bugs/exploits, but if I did spot any more in future then I wouldn't report those either. My heart tells me to report them, but my head tells me no.
I had to sign one of these things when I left a company. They withheld wages until I signed. Totally illegal of course, but I needed the money.
If cinemas would do something about other people talking during movies then we'd go again. But they won't, so now we never go. The last 3 or 4 films we saw, we had to walk out partway through and get a refund. So we just don't bother anymore.
"We will get nowhere if everything keeps private; money isn't everything"
Then give your own stuff away for free.
Just to say, I enjoyed it. I especially liked the structure, which focused on the main law suit, before introducing the Thiel issue, and then moving on to discuss other issues. It packaged up a multi-layered story in a neat, easily-digestible bundle.
* Go to the search tab in the mobile twitter app. The search bar is hidden by default and you have to scroll up and click on it.
* Media player on PS4. Fast forward and rewind buttons go at an insane speed, i.e. you can skip through an entire film in a couple of seconds. There are YEARS of forum posts complaining about it.
* Pretty much everything on iCloud is broken and has been for years. Handoff, Airdrop and iMessage sometimes work, sometimes don't, and if you can't rely on something then it's useless. Apple support forums are full of workarounds but the faults are never fixed.
* Unity. So many broken features, never fixed. The latest release carried a huge list of impressive new features, but was greeted by hundreds of "will you ever fix XYZ" comments. The dirty secret of Unity development is that it's great for prototyping, but you need to custom write everything that matters. Right down to basic stuff like vector maths.
* Steam. For some games it asks your date of birth, which is remembered between sessions so you can just click ok. But occasionally it forgets, and if you click ok with the wrong date set then you can't access that game... ever. If you try to access it again then it says you're underage, with no option to enter the correct date.
The incident in the photos brought about the immediate collapse of a trial, and an arrest, potentially leading to another trial. Publishing the photos would have been contempt of court.
In the 30+ years that I've been using computers, I've had 4 viruses. Two of them came through Adobe exploits. (Both were served by web ads on mainstream sites, which downloaded and auto-opened PDF files which in turn deployed and opened executables.)
I'm so sick of most torrent sites nowadays. There's one I still use, an ExtraTorrent proxy, that is just about tolerable, but every other site I've tried over the past year is full of popups, popunders, redirects, etc. I've got popups blocked, adverts blocked, everything blocked that I know how to block, and still the sites are practically unusable.
When I read this story, just out of interest I went to the https version of the pirate bay to see if it worked. Clicked on the search box and immediately I had a full-screen popup, two smaller popups, and a text-to-speech reader (ffs!!) reading out a warning message about my system having been compromised and giving me a phone number to call.
...this is legal?
Will newspapers die? Hopefully not.
Are they dying right now? Yes.
Or, more accurately, they're being killed from within. What you have to remember is that newspapers aren't run by journalists, they're run by managers and salesmen who don't seem to understand their target market (readers) or their product (quality reporting). They don't seem to look further than the next issue -- if that hits the streets then great, job done. Who cares how it's achieved.
Here in the UK, so many quality journalists and photographers are being let go because managers see staff as an expendable resource. Got 20 journalists working their arses off to produce the paper? Cool, sack 10 of them and use agency copy. The public will never notice, right? That's £200,000 saved per year. When the readership halves because of rubbish content, we'll dream up some other excuse to explain that away. And then we'll sack more staff. Never the managers. They're not expendable. Always the journalists.
I'll give you an insight in to where the power lies at newspapers. About 2 years ago I was working at a great bi-weekly city newspaper. We were working on a story for the next day's paper and I went over to talk to the news editor. He told me that there might not be space to run the story anymore, because four news pages had been dropped. Why? Because the paper liked to have a 50/50 split between editorial and adverts. The ad sales team had sold a full four pages less adverts than they were meant to. So to make everything look right with the upper management, the manager of the ad sales team simply had four news pages dropped.
It wasn't like we were short-staffed that week or there had been a shortage of stories. The news was written, the photos had been taken, the pages were being made up. And four pages were wiped out, just like that, to make one sales guy look good.
Ask anyone who works in newspapers if they've ever heard of the editorial team having ad pages dropped to make space for news. Go on, have a guess how often that happens.
tl;dr: Newspaper sales are dropping. Managers try to save money by making the newspapers worse. Sales drop further. And so on.
Ridiculous. Having lots of bad journalism is not the same as having no quality journalism. We've always had quality journalism, and we still do, just less and less because people are decreasingly willing to pay.
If he did make out with the teacher then I'm on his side because he should be free to tell the truth. If he didn't make out with the teacher then I'm on everyone else's side because he lied in a way that could ruin her career.
Have a significant penalty for an invalid complaint.
I was born and lived in Yorkshire, England for 20 years, a place that has a light-hearted reputation for being tight with money. A couple of years ago my girlfriend and I went on a road trip and visited Yorkshire. We had breakfast in a cafe where I plugged in my phone. The owner came over and started talking about how we were putting him out of business and electricity isn't cheap etc. We thought he was joking at first. But then he asked us for 50p to cover the cost of the electric. He was serious.
I'm struggling to think of any company that I trust less than Google. I mean, I don't really "trust" any company, but with Google I specifically distrust them. Anyone who has had to deal with their various press offices around the world will have sensed that there's something creepily wrong with that company. The whole operation screams "go away".
I do wonder why this happens. I've always had the vague explanation in my head that the OS gets clogged up with files that it has to catalogue, parse, etc, but I suspect it's not that simple.
When I switched full-time to Macs about 2 years ago I thought it would be great that I'd never again have to put up with my OS slowing down. But sure enough, it did, and every 6 months or so I have to blank my Mac and reinstall. Which to be honest I don't mind doing because it's super-easy on a Mac, and I like knowing that my system is clean again.
Although curse you Apple the last install has left me with a weird issue whereby every time I boot the machine OSX asks me to verify the iCloud keychain from another device. I've done this maybe a dozen times now and have finally given up. I've had to accept that until I reinstall OSX, for some reason I'm going to get the keychain nag every time I boot up. But pretty much everything on iOS/OSX is broken at the moment so no big surprise.
That's the attitude that allows these companies to get away with their discourteous behaviour.
Now if only I knew someone who uses Skype chat...
I'm okay with paying for an ad-free service and then having ads pushed at me. Said nobody ever.
I blanked my Mac a few weeks ago and when I started reinstalling software I got some survey crap popping up on my screen asking for my details. Turns out it was the SourceForge installer for FileZilla that had sneaked it through. Googling it threw up enough horror stories to make me just blank the Mac again and start over. I'll never download anything from SourceForge again. A decade of trust destroyed in one stupid move.
Replying again :-)
I totally take on board what you're saying about the scoring system, but I still think it's evident that the judge's personal opinions influenced the sentencing. Consider this quote from the Wired article:
None of that is fact. It's what the judge *thinks* is fact. Suppose her opinion had been that Silk Road was a naive, youthful experiment, something that he'd just thrown together and then it snowballed, something that he wasn't proud of. Would she really have handed down the harshest possible sentence? I think she'd have found some justification to give him a lighter sentence.
Maybe I'm just getting more empathetic as I get older. I've never done anything illegal but I've sure done stupid things, as we all have, and losing the rest of your life because you were a dick in your early 30s seems almost inhumane to me. Most of us do stupid stuff and then we move on and learn from our own stupidity. This guy deserves to lose some of his liberty because his stupidity was illegal, but his entire life? I just can't convince myself that this is how I want my fellow humans to be treated.