They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone
And they're going to be quickly disappointed.
Rob
You got that right. The communications technology I pay for is for my benefit, and I'll respond if and when I feel I need to. It's called "prioritization", and only small children think so highly of themselves as to always expect instant gratification. Adults learn very quickly that they're not automatically at the top of everyone else's list.
Now that the USA has a huge stake in the current economic system, it effectively erects barriers to entry that prevent other emerging economies from doing what it itself did to emerge from backwater underdevelopment and a permanent existence as a low-margin commodities producer.
Also, at this point in my life, the consequences are probably minimal. I am who I am, I have thirty years of my career behind me, and if I posted drunken pictures of myself at a party I doubt anyone would care. The question is, would that be the same for a person in their early twenties, say, who's just starting out? It's a lot easier to get burned by indiscretion when you're young.
The reality that you are aware of is different, you mean. But I'm talking about that hidden reality, where you never know how someone interpreted what you posted (or what others posted about you) and the effect it may have upon your life. Heck, I'll never know what effect what's already out there has had on my life, my prospects... and I'm a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record, nothing that I think would cause me grief. But I don't know, and I see no reason to make the problem worse.
But like I said earlier, this is a tradeoff... some deliberate loss of privacy for the perceived benefits of such services. Each of us is free to make that tradeoff as we see fit: obviously I'm a bit more conservative than you are.
it's the consequences of the assumptions people make that are the problem.
That's a meaningless distinction if you don't get the job, or don't get into the school you applied to, or any of the other things that can happen. This is about people prejudging other people based upon a limited snapshot of that other person's life, I agree. But that's precisely the kind of "consequence" that I was talking about. If everyone in a position of authority who is reviewing Facebook pages were reasonable and tolerant, this probably wouldn't matter. But they're not. Frequently they're assholes, or politically-motivated, or just afraid for their own jobs if they make a mistake. So they'll make a snap judgment based upon a photo or a line or two of text on a Web site, and move on to the next candidate. That's the way it works, and if you don't understand that much about human nature, your Facebook page is probably the least of your worries.
The part I don't understand is why anyone would voluntarily become a part of InfraGrad and start "sharing information" about others in the first place.
Because, if you're not in the InfraGuard then you must be an InfraRed.
Is this a back-door effort to get ad-blocking out of Firefox?
If Firefox wants to turn itself into another Internet Explorer, I say let them. It's their foot. From a UI perspective, most browsers are largely at parity nowadays anyway, and Mozilla should realize what it is that has made Firefox the most popular non-Microsoft browser. Put it this way: the reason I've used Firefox extensively for the past few years is the security plugins that are available. If you take that away from me, I have no real reason to stick with Firefox, and probably won't. Now, I've never written a Firefox plugin, and I'll take some people's word for it that the model needs updating. But simplifying it to the point where the browser will lose substantial functionality seems like a major backward step.
Yeah, I knew someone would try to defend their pet viewpoint. Realistically speaking, you will probably go your entire life without being in a situation where you will need to defend yourself with a gun. If you want to have fewer deaths from crime, you'll get significantly better results from improving law enforcement than you will from having guns legal. "America is safer when you don't know who is armed" is purely propaganda.
At heart, I think the entire issue is something of which you have little understanding. That's okay, I suppose... most Americans don't either. But it's pretty obvious from your post that you haven't really researched the subject. I think that if you did spend some time understanding how the defensive use of firearms (including the most common scenario where not a single shot is fired) regularly averts violence and saves countless lives, you might feel differently. Disarmed societies have not, in spite decades of rhetoric on the subject by gun control proponents of one stripe or another, turned into beatific violence-free Utopias. It would be nice if that were true, but as is usually the case when dealing with millions of human beings... it's just not that simple. People want easy answers. Politicians like them too, especially if it means extending their authority and adding more government employees to the payroll. Gun control is a simple answer that sounds good (thus making ordinary citizens happy) and re-elects politicians (thus making them happy.) That automatically makes it suspect in my book.
A better solution would be a well-armed and well trained population of gun owners. But that requires making people take responsibility for their ineptness, and elected governments often have a really hard time making that happen. Just look at what passes for a driver's license examination in most States, and we lose far far more people to preventable car accidents that we do to gun deaths. But nobody is really up in arms about "car control.", although if the idea is truly to prevent the violent loss of life they should be.
Gun control is about one thing, and one thing only: a further extension of government power and limiting the individual's ability to resist. I know you obviously won't agree with the basic premise of the Second Amendment, but the truth is that now, more than any other time in our history, are we approaching a time when the Founder's wisdom may become obvious to everyone. Is England different in this regard? Maybe... but frankly I don't think so. Both countries have overreaching central governments that don't recognize any fundamental limits on their rights to take power from their respective peoples. They're being held in check only by traditions and laws that are both being slowly changed to the detriment of the ordinary citizen. Our Founders foresaw this centuries ago.
Increasing law enforcement will have zero effect upon gun crime. That's because the cops cannot prevent someone from shooting you. The best they can do is pick up the pieces after they cart you off to the morgue. That's the reality of it: more cops don't automatically equal fewer shooting deaths. The only way that I could seen gun control being at all effective is if you allow the police to continuously and randomly search all private residences for weapons, or if the entire population (including criminals) would cheerfully turn in their weapons and never try to acquire more. Maybe.
I don't think I'd want to live in such a society, though.
In the days of yore, it was the girls that ran the telephone exchanges that served up the gossip. Nowadays people publish gossip themselves. The result is much the same though.
Worse. Now the telephone exchange girls all over the planet are serving up our gossip. Of course, I think they call them "routers" and "Web servers" nowadays.
I don't either, but it isn't strictly due to resistance, some of it is social passivity and things like that.
Oh, sure. I'm an old fart compared to the bulk of Facebook users. My life works well enough, and everyone that needs to know anything about me already does. Facebook wouldn't add much to that, at this point.
Good heavens, you're not one of those "alcohol is a drug" types, are you? Seriously, you're right about that: anyone that has a problem with marijuana had better have at least as big a problem with alcohol. The fact that alcohol is the traditionally-accepted form of psychotropic self-abuse in most Western cultures doesn't make it any less of a drug. Other societies have different drugs of choice, drugs that are permissible only because of a history, a tradition, that makes them okay. Some cultures look upon alcohol consumption as being just as big a transgression as America's government currently perceives pot, for that matter.
Frankly, I never much cared for Bill Clinton, but I also didn't much care that he had smoked some weed once. Some people were pretty upset about that at the time, as I remember. Nor, for that matter, was George Bush Sr. an alcoholic if he had a glass of wine at dinner.
George Bush, Jr.... well, I think most of us would agree that he was smoking something.
but I also do not think that the majority of those people are going to face *any* difficulty from those activities
Probably not, if nothing else from the anonymity afforded by the sheer number of people participating in those activities. But if you ask those that do get hit, they'll probably feel differently. In any event, this is just another one of life's little tradeoffs: the perceived benefits of social networking vs. the very real risks of engaging in those activities. Personally, there's nothing that I would gain from having a Facebook page, consequently any risk > 0 is too much. But that's just me.
This is pretty major as so many vendors are affected by it. However, until there's an update or complete recall & replacement, I'd recommend using Truecrypt. Certified by NIST (see HERE. Cross platform. Free (as in spoken beer;o). Of course, one can only hope that its implementation is better than the devices currently uncovered:P
I remember a recent Slashdot article about a vulnerability in TrueCrypt. Don't remember much more than that. Does anyone else know what I'm talking about?
My kids could read this. I have to at least make an effort, ok?
Besides, what does it bother you that I made the effort? It was my effort, and you clearly figured out what I meant.
Ignore him. That's what "offtopic" moderations are for.
Security specialist Bruce Schneier was blunt in his characterization of the flaw: 'It's a stupid crypto mistake and they screwed up and they should be rightfully embarrassed for making it.'"
even though forensics showed the files had not been opened during the trip.
You're assuming that the drive was accessed using an operating system which would update timestamps. There's absolutely no way to prove that, and any intruder with half a brain would have taken steps. For example, had the drive been cloned while he was there, there'd be no evidence of it. Dollars to doughnuts that's exactly what happened, and the mere fact that he took the equipment with him includes the presumption that his files could have been compromised. No way around that, and yes he should have known better. Laptops are one of the biggest security risks ever invented by the hand of Man, and rightly give security people nightmares.
Sure, but the set of things that society uses to judge is also constantly in flux.
True... and that might very apply in the case of a school or an employer that looks up your MySpace page (i.e., a picture of you drunk at a party with a big mug of beer in your hand.) Social norms do change. However, that doesn't apply when it comes to identity thieves, or example. What about reporters trying to dig up dirt on you while you're running for political office? There are lots of ways personal info can come back to haunt you.
Matter of fact, it can work the other way: activities that might be socially acceptable while you're posting them can become less so in the future. Like we've agreed, things change, and such changes are rather unpredictable.
So you never know, and like I said, anything you post online is a potential liability. Is posting highly personal data on a fundamentally untrustworthy Web service for the purposes of social interaction worth the potential future costs? Many think so now (or those sites wouldn't be so popular) but whether they will feel the same way five or ten years down the line is another story.
Alternatively, the things you call consequences may simply disappear.
Not likely. You know the old saying, "Friends come and go... enemies accumulate." Anything you post online can and will be used against you if someone thinks they'll benefit from it. Thinking otherwise is foolish. The Internet has not changed human nature, if anything, it's amplified some of the worst aspects of it.
. Given that the significant bulk of social networkers are American
That's probably true, but I, for one, do not post the intimate details of my life on the Internet. Mainly that's because, as an adult, I have an awareness of consequence (having suffered through enough such consequences over the years to have gained an appreciation of the power of my own stupidity.) Nevertheless, that Facebook/MySpace phenomenon is largely an expression of childlike behavior on the part of many of those users. Eventually, they'll grow up and wonder "what the Hell was I thinking?!". Or maybe they won't: some people are just stupid after all.
In my perhaps under-educated opinion, the Muslim community has a huge problem on its hands, one only it can solve.
Oh, we can solve it. We can kill them all... but that would probably create more problems than it would solve.
Besides, I'm not arguing that the Muslim community has some serious issues. I'm just pointing out that presumption of guilt based upon race is decidedly unAmerican.
Or maybe it because the vast majority of people blowing themselves and others up claim to be of the Muslim faith and are from Middle Eastern countries.
Yes yes, all Arabs aren't terrorists... but all terrorists are Arabs, etc. And that's certainly true, to a degree (we do have some homegrown headcases, Timothy McVeigh comes to mind) but yes, modern terrorism lies largely in the province of the Muslim community.
The problem is that there are plenty of people of Middle Eastern extraction that are loyal U.S. citizens, who were born and raised here, and have no particular sympathies with Muslim psychopaths. Are they less deserving of the protections afforded by the United States Constitution than anyone else? What's going on now is no different, in principle, from the internment of American citizens who happened to be Japanese during World War II (and if you think that couldn't happen here again... think again.) I'm glad I happen to be a middle-aged white guy: maybe I'll be spared some indignities.
In any event, if the accident of birth is sufficient cause for having your civil liberties stripped from you, then this country has a big problem. And it's not from Arab terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone
And they're going to be quickly disappointed.
Rob
You got that right. The communications technology I pay for is for my benefit, and I'll respond if and when I feel I need to. It's called "prioritization", and only small children think so highly of themselves as to always expect instant gratification. Adults learn very quickly that they're not automatically at the top of everyone else's list.
You've just described the whole of FOSS.
Don't limit that to FOSS. That's unnecessary bias. The reality is that 99% of everything is crud, whether free or otherwise.
Now that the USA has a huge stake in the current economic system, it effectively erects barriers to entry that prevent other emerging economies from doing what it itself did to emerge from backwater underdevelopment and a permanent existence as a low-margin commodities producer.
Not working so well with China, is it.
if so, how many people still read keith laumer, and get the ref ?
It's funny, but I get about two people a month on Slashdot that recognize it.
Also, at this point in my life, the consequences are probably minimal. I am who I am, I have thirty years of my career behind me, and if I posted drunken pictures of myself at a party I doubt anyone would care. The question is, would that be the same for a person in their early twenties, say, who's just starting out? It's a lot easier to get burned by indiscretion when you're young.
Huh. Troll?
The reality seems to be much different
The reality that you are aware of is different, you mean. But I'm talking about that hidden reality, where you never know how someone interpreted what you posted (or what others posted about you) and the effect it may have upon your life. Heck, I'll never know what effect what's already out there has had on my life, my prospects ... and I'm a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record, nothing that I think would cause me grief. But I don't know, and I see no reason to make the problem worse.
... some deliberate loss of privacy for the perceived benefits of such services. Each of us is free to make that tradeoff as we see fit: obviously I'm a bit more conservative than you are.
But like I said earlier, this is a tradeoff
it's the consequences of the assumptions people make that are the problem.
That's a meaningless distinction if you don't get the job, or don't get into the school you applied to, or any of the other things that can happen. This is about people prejudging other people based upon a limited snapshot of that other person's life, I agree. But that's precisely the kind of "consequence" that I was talking about. If everyone in a position of authority who is reviewing Facebook pages were reasonable and tolerant, this probably wouldn't matter. But they're not. Frequently they're assholes, or politically-motivated, or just afraid for their own jobs if they make a mistake. So they'll make a snap judgment based upon a photo or a line or two of text on a Web site, and move on to the next candidate. That's the way it works, and if you don't understand that much about human nature, your Facebook page is probably the least of your worries.
The part I don't understand is why anyone would voluntarily become a part of InfraGrad and start "sharing information" about others in the first place.
Because, if you're not in the InfraGuard then you must be an InfraRed.
Is this a back-door effort to get ad-blocking out of Firefox?
If Firefox wants to turn itself into another Internet Explorer, I say let them. It's their foot. From a UI perspective, most browsers are largely at parity nowadays anyway, and Mozilla should realize what it is that has made Firefox the most popular non-Microsoft browser. Put it this way: the reason I've used Firefox extensively for the past few years is the security plugins that are available. If you take that away from me, I have no real reason to stick with Firefox, and probably won't. Now, I've never written a Firefox plugin, and I'll take some people's word for it that the model needs updating. But simplifying it to the point where the browser will lose substantial functionality seems like a major backward step.
You don't have to have a problem with a drug to consider it a drug.
I think you missed my point, got it exactly backwards in fact.
Yeah, I knew someone would try to defend their pet viewpoint. Realistically speaking, you will probably go your entire life without being in a situation where you will need to defend yourself with a gun. If you want to have fewer deaths from crime, you'll get significantly better results from improving law enforcement than you will from having guns legal. "America is safer when you don't know who is armed" is purely propaganda.
At heart, I think the entire issue is something of which you have little understanding. That's okay, I suppose ... most Americans don't either. But it's pretty obvious from your post that you haven't really researched the subject. I think that if you did spend some time understanding how the defensive use of firearms (including the most common scenario where not a single shot is fired) regularly averts violence and saves countless lives, you might feel differently. Disarmed societies have not, in spite decades of rhetoric on the subject by gun control proponents of one stripe or another, turned into beatific violence-free Utopias. It would be nice if that were true, but as is usually the case when dealing with millions of human beings ... it's just not that simple. People want easy answers. Politicians like them too, especially if it means extending their authority and adding more government employees to the payroll. Gun control is a simple answer that sounds good (thus making ordinary citizens happy) and re-elects politicians (thus making them happy.) That automatically makes it suspect in my book.
... but frankly I don't think so. Both countries have overreaching central governments that don't recognize any fundamental limits on their rights to take power from their respective peoples. They're being held in check only by traditions and laws that are both being slowly changed to the detriment of the ordinary citizen. Our Founders foresaw this centuries ago.
A better solution would be a well-armed and well trained population of gun owners. But that requires making people take responsibility for their ineptness, and elected governments often have a really hard time making that happen. Just look at what passes for a driver's license examination in most States, and we lose far far more people to preventable car accidents that we do to gun deaths. But nobody is really up in arms about "car control.", although if the idea is truly to prevent the violent loss of life they should be.
Gun control is about one thing, and one thing only: a further extension of government power and limiting the individual's ability to resist. I know you obviously won't agree with the basic premise of the Second Amendment, but the truth is that now, more than any other time in our history, are we approaching a time when the Founder's wisdom may become obvious to everyone. Is England different in this regard? Maybe
Increasing law enforcement will have zero effect upon gun crime. That's because the cops cannot prevent someone from shooting you. The best they can do is pick up the pieces after they cart you off to the morgue. That's the reality of it: more cops don't automatically equal fewer shooting deaths. The only way that I could seen gun control being at all effective is if you allow the police to continuously and randomly search all private residences for weapons, or if the entire population (including criminals) would cheerfully turn in their weapons and never try to acquire more. Maybe.
I don't think I'd want to live in such a society, though.
In the days of yore, it was the girls that ran the telephone exchanges that served up the gossip. Nowadays people publish gossip themselves. The result is much the same though.
Worse. Now the telephone exchange girls all over the planet are serving up our gossip. Of course, I think they call them "routers" and "Web servers" nowadays.
I don't either, but it isn't strictly due to resistance, some of it is social passivity and things like that.
Oh, sure. I'm an old fart compared to the bulk of Facebook users. My life works well enough, and everyone that needs to know anything about me already does. Facebook wouldn't add much to that, at this point.
and Bush Sr. probably was not a teetotaler
Good heavens, you're not one of those "alcohol is a drug" types, are you? Seriously, you're right about that: anyone that has a problem with marijuana had better have at least as big a problem with alcohol. The fact that alcohol is the traditionally-accepted form of psychotropic self-abuse in most Western cultures doesn't make it any less of a drug. Other societies have different drugs of choice, drugs that are permissible only because of a history, a tradition, that makes them okay. Some cultures look upon alcohol consumption as being just as big a transgression as America's government currently perceives pot, for that matter.
... well, I think most of us would agree that he was smoking something.
Frankly, I never much cared for Bill Clinton, but I also didn't much care that he had smoked some weed once. Some people were pretty upset about that at the time, as I remember. Nor, for that matter, was George Bush Sr. an alcoholic if he had a glass of wine at dinner.
George Bush, Jr.
but I also do not think that the majority of those people are going to face *any* difficulty from those activities
Probably not, if nothing else from the anonymity afforded by the sheer number of people participating in those activities. But if you ask those that do get hit, they'll probably feel differently. In any event, this is just another one of life's little tradeoffs: the perceived benefits of social networking vs. the very real risks of engaging in those activities. Personally, there's nothing that I would gain from having a Facebook page, consequently any risk > 0 is too much. But that's just me.
This is pretty major as so many vendors are affected by it. However, until there's an update or complete recall & replacement, I'd recommend using Truecrypt. Certified by NIST (see HERE. Cross platform. Free (as in spoken beer ;o). Of course, one can only hope that its implementation is better than the devices currently uncovered :P
I remember a recent Slashdot article about a vulnerability in TrueCrypt. Don't remember much more than that. Does anyone else know what I'm talking about?
My kids could read this. I have to at least make an effort, ok? Besides, what does it bother you that I made the effort? It was my effort, and you clearly figured out what I meant.
Ignore him. That's what "offtopic" moderations are for.
Security specialist Bruce Schneier was blunt in his characterization of the flaw: 'It's a stupid crypto mistake and they screwed up and they should be rightfully embarrassed for making it.'"
That's our Bruce.
even though forensics showed the files had not been opened during the trip.
You're assuming that the drive was accessed using an operating system which would update timestamps. There's absolutely no way to prove that, and any intruder with half a brain would have taken steps. For example, had the drive been cloned while he was there, there'd be no evidence of it. Dollars to doughnuts that's exactly what happened, and the mere fact that he took the equipment with him includes the presumption that his files could have been compromised. No way around that, and yes he should have known better. Laptops are one of the biggest security risks ever invented by the hand of Man, and rightly give security people nightmares.
Sure, but the set of things that society uses to judge is also constantly in flux.
True ... and that might very apply in the case of a school or an employer that looks up your MySpace page (i.e., a picture of you drunk at a party with a big mug of beer in your hand.) Social norms do change. However, that doesn't apply when it comes to identity thieves, or example. What about reporters trying to dig up dirt on you while you're running for political office? There are lots of ways personal info can come back to haunt you.
Matter of fact, it can work the other way: activities that might be socially acceptable while you're posting them can become less so in the future. Like we've agreed, things change, and such changes are rather unpredictable.
So you never know, and like I said, anything you post online is a potential liability. Is posting highly personal data on a fundamentally untrustworthy Web service for the purposes of social interaction worth the potential future costs? Many think so now (or those sites wouldn't be so popular) but whether they will feel the same way five or ten years down the line is another story.
Alternatively, the things you call consequences may simply disappear.
Not likely. You know the old saying, "Friends come and go ... enemies accumulate." Anything you post online can and will be used against you if someone thinks they'll benefit from it. Thinking otherwise is foolish. The Internet has not changed human nature, if anything, it's amplified some of the worst aspects of it.
. Given that the significant bulk of social networkers are American
That's probably true, but I, for one, do not post the intimate details of my life on the Internet. Mainly that's because, as an adult, I have an awareness of consequence (having suffered through enough such consequences over the years to have gained an appreciation of the power of my own stupidity.) Nevertheless, that Facebook/MySpace phenomenon is largely an expression of childlike behavior on the part of many of those users. Eventually, they'll grow up and wonder "what the Hell was I thinking?!". Or maybe they won't: some people are just stupid after all.
In my perhaps under-educated opinion, the Muslim community has a huge problem on its hands, one only it can solve.
Oh, we can solve it. We can kill them all ... but that would probably create more problems than it would solve.
Besides, I'm not arguing that the Muslim community has some serious issues. I'm just pointing out that presumption of guilt based upon race is decidedly unAmerican.
Or maybe it because the vast majority of people blowing themselves and others up claim to be of the Muslim faith and are from Middle Eastern countries.
Yes yes, all Arabs aren't terrorists ... but all terrorists are Arabs, etc. And that's certainly true, to a degree (we do have some homegrown headcases, Timothy McVeigh comes to mind) but yes, modern terrorism lies largely in the province of the Muslim community.
... think again.) I'm glad I happen to be a middle-aged white guy: maybe I'll be spared some indignities.
The problem is that there are plenty of people of Middle Eastern extraction that are loyal U.S. citizens, who were born and raised here, and have no particular sympathies with Muslim psychopaths. Are they less deserving of the protections afforded by the United States Constitution than anyone else? What's going on now is no different, in principle, from the internment of American citizens who happened to be Japanese during World War II (and if you think that couldn't happen here again
In any event, if the accident of birth is sufficient cause for having your civil liberties stripped from you, then this country has a big problem. And it's not from Arab terrorists.