My smart phone paid for itself the afternoon I accidentally misconfigured the firewall on the company's ecommerce server (which is in a colo several hours drive from me). Misconfigured as in blocked my own IP address instead of whitelisting it. I was able to download a SSH client, open a terminal session and revert the firewall settings from my phone.
You allow SSH connections to your firewall from the world?
I can't even reach our firewall from outside of our network without a VPN connection. If I locked myself out, I'd be completely locked out unless I was on site. (and hopefully I hadn't written the config to memory so I could have someone power cycle it)
LOL
Theres a fine line between being smart with security and just creating more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot.
I suppose the only thing left to lament is all the money HTC had to waste to bring this common sense to light. Money that could have been spent on, well, something useful.
Something useful like Australian judges and politicians. Apple probably just spend more in that area than HTC.
Why do you think free speech is good for the humankind, overally?
Well, this is basic civics, I'm surprised you didn't learn this somewhere. You might want to pick up a good book about governments and learn this basic stuff.
Freedom of speech, that is the ability to criticize the government, is important, because then the people can change the government if they decide they don't like it. Search for the meaning of "the pen is mightier than the sword" if you'd like more information on that topic.
That you don't need freedom of speech for the people to change the government is being adequately demonstrated in the 'Arab Spring'.
I suggest you try running such a poor country and end starving.
I swear to you I could do better than Kim Jong Il. I would start by allowing free speech, criticism of the government. That alone would make me a better leader.
If you gave North Korea more permissive government, freedom of speech etc but by that same permissive government and your own failure to manage the logistics of a state the nation collapsed into mass chaos and lawlessness, bankruptcy and even worse starvation than it undergoes at present, then while the mass media of the world would probably praise your 'leadership' it wouldn't make it true.
Here in the UK Methadone has been used as a heroin substitute for some years. It's considered to be more addictive than heroin but of predictable quality and supply, hence its use.
The glaringly obvious solution of the State control and supply of heroin to addicts is apparently beyond those who make such decisions. Far better to throw money up the wall buying a substitute and then pretend you're handing out medicine.
yeah and the side effects of methadone are supposed to be unpleasant enough to deter addiction. Well thats what the Nazis figured when they invented the stuff...
In a democracy, the politicians who are voted for are not the people who are in power. The people who are in power in democracy are those who arrange for favorable or unfavorable media representations of those politicians.
The act of voting in a democracy changes nothing, in terms of the distribution of political power. It is pure theater. Not because voting for this or that political actor wouldn't change anything but because to bring about real change via vote depends on statistically significant numbers of people acting in concert. But advertising -- media manipulation of public opinion -- works just as well for political parties as it does for soft drinks and fast food. People are, in general and en masse, highly susceptible to suggestion.
Any political actor who might bring about political change which 'the media' would not like are effectively destroyed by either negative advertising or lack of positive advertising.
Tangent: when they did switch, the democracy was apparently under immediate attack. Some UK newpaper barons from neighbouring island (the Barclay Brothers, who own the Telegraph newspaper) threw their weight behind the democracy campaign and put up a candidate. They have subsequently been accused of using their muscle as a local employer to punish and manipulate the population (who voted for someone other than the Brothers' preferred candidate). A thoroughly surreal situation and bizarre to think of a state the size of a very small town / large village immediately under attack by commercial interests and pressures!
Thats exactly what democracy does; it empowers commercial interests (especially media) to take control of government. Virtually all democracies are immediately subverted by corporate control over the means by which the population forms opinions on how to spend their vote. Democracy is the favored form of government in capitalism because it places political control alongside control of capital.
Most of the 'anglo saxon' cultures are fucked up in very similar ways.
From the USA where a snow sculpture of the Venus di Milo resulted in a visit from the police "either cover it up or take it down", evidently it was 'indecent'.
To the UK where a hairdresser had to take down an advertisement featuring his wife sporting one of his hairstyles because it 'showed too much cleavage'.
(to us Australians who aren't afraid of the human body, this seem pants on head retarded).
Is that the same Australia where a couple were arrested, tried and convicted for having sex in the lounge of their house, not visible from the street? When an off duty cop entered their garden 'looking for his lost dog' and saw them through the window?
View them in google earth and check historical images.
Some interesting things show up for example you can see the 'crazy white lines' under construction. There are also a few other marked areas nearby that seem similar. One of them looks very old.
The concentric circles with planes is interesting too; there was another aircraft there a few years ago but its been removed.
Unless you didn't have a state issued permit or said something negative about a business that cost them money (even if true). Or if an emotionally unstable did something emotionally unstable in response to your words.
I bet that China, unlike the USA, doesn't have special caged and protected 'Free Speech Zones' where protesters can stand, out of harms way, and exercise their right to free speech.
Personally, I think that hypocrisy is a perfectly normal human frailty. Everyone is guilty of it to some extent, its not even worth criticising someone for.
I would say that US is more pathetic. At least China keeps it within their own region. US takes it everywhere with ACTA, DMCA and actually making Verisign and ICANN remove domains for copyright infringement. China filters and doesn't affect other countries.
Don't forget drone attacks. "Ooops sorry our drone blew up the people at that wedding reception."
I agree that some implementations of microtransactions suck but think about this:
Do you play WoW every single day? I don't.
In order to play WoW at all I need to pay for a 30 day subscription. But what if I only want to play for a few weeks every few months?
Shouldn't there be a way for me to pay for my WoW game time in smaller chunks than 30 days?
If Blizzard offered a way to pay 'by the minute' would that be bad for the game?
I can imagine that some would argue that this would encourage the 'casuals' and ruin the game for the truly dedicated players who really do play every single day month after month.
But the modern game industry increasingly caters to normal people, not just dedicated gamers. I think thats good because I don't consider myself 'a gamer' just an ordinary guy who is interested in MMOs, just not 'dedicated' to them.
Representative democracy only works when people pay attention to government, and vote accordingly. When was the last time you voted or even contacted your representative based on copyright? I never have. Maybe I should, but there are other things I care about more.
Most people vote based on what they are told by the media. A minority of people vote based on properly informed and developed opinion.
Democracy is subject to the same 'forces', the same social manipulations and psychology, that underlie advertising. Advertising works and is well worth the billions that are spent on it. Advertising works just as well for 'informing' the public on how they should vote as it does for getting products off of the shelf.
Therefore 'representative' democracy will always be representative of the will of easily manipulated people who are fed false information. Well-informed political debate and dialectic are kept as far away from democracy as possible.
The biggest difference is that we seriously lack any aliens trying to skew things into their own agenda when it comes to astrophysics.
Perhaps setting back our understanding of physics by somehow tampering with our experiments to constantly prove Einstein 'right' about the impossibility of exceeding the speed of light suits their agenda just fine. Ie by keeping us locked up in this solar system...
If you chart the US budget deficit for the last 30+ years and put it up next to the military spending you get a fairly good correspondence most years. Many years the US would run a surplus without the military sucking the blood out of the budget.
How cowardly does Washington have to be that they need to spend more money on the military than every other country in the world combined to "defend" themselves?
Its ok, the USA can just borrow some more money from China to fund its war machine.
God could have created the universe with an infinite past; just because God created the universe doesn't mean that there has to be a 'starting point' in time which us humans can point to as 'creation'. God is bigger than time, so to speak.
If we define religion as the belief in an omnipotent entity / entities that can never be wrong, and whose smallest whim is the absolute word of law
This would only capture a minute fraction of actual religion and then mostly the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic part. Most religions in human history have had gods as fallible and definitely not all-knowing.
I prefer it that way, myself. I detest the "God is ALWAYS right, totally perfect, omnipotent and all knowing and therefore my religion is CORRECT on absolutely EVERYTHING and *your* religion is a stinking pile of doggy doo." attitude of monotheists.
Pantheists tend to be a little more tolerant; after all the gods can be wrong so hey... maybe these other people who believe in other gods could be right.
Slashdot Mirror
Ancedote:
My smart phone paid for itself the afternoon I accidentally misconfigured the firewall on the company's ecommerce server (which is in a colo several hours drive from me). Misconfigured as in blocked my own IP address instead of whitelisting it. I was able to download a SSH client, open a terminal session and revert the firewall settings from my phone.
You allow SSH connections to your firewall from the world?
I can't even reach our firewall from outside of our network without a VPN connection. If I locked myself out, I'd be completely locked out unless I was on site. (and hopefully I hadn't written the config to memory so I could have someone power cycle it)
LOL
Theres a fine line between being smart with security and just creating more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot.
I suppose the only thing left to lament is all the money HTC had to waste to bring this common sense to light. Money that could have been spent on, well, something useful.
Something useful like Australian judges and politicians. Apple probably just spend more in that area than HTC.
How are Australian election campaigns funded?
I wonder how Irish election campaigns are funded?
Why do you think free speech is good for the humankind, overally?
Well, this is basic civics, I'm surprised you didn't learn this somewhere. You might want to pick up a good book about governments and learn this basic stuff.
Freedom of speech, that is the ability to criticize the government, is important, because then the people can change the government if they decide they don't like it. Search for the meaning of "the pen is mightier than the sword" if you'd like more information on that topic.
That you don't need freedom of speech for the people to change the government is being adequately demonstrated in the 'Arab Spring'.
I suggest you try running such a poor country and end starving.
I swear to you I could do better than Kim Jong Il. I would start by allowing free speech, criticism of the government. That alone would make me a better leader.
If you gave North Korea more permissive government, freedom of speech etc but by that same permissive government and your own failure to manage the logistics of a state the nation collapsed into mass chaos and lawlessness, bankruptcy and even worse starvation than it undergoes at present, then while the mass media of the world would probably praise your 'leadership' it wouldn't make it true.
Here in the UK Methadone has been used as a heroin substitute for some years. It's considered to be more addictive than heroin but of predictable quality and supply, hence its use.
The glaringly obvious solution of the State control and supply of heroin to addicts is apparently beyond those who make such decisions. Far better to throw money up the wall buying a substitute and then pretend you're handing out medicine.
yeah and the side effects of methadone are supposed to be unpleasant enough to deter addiction. Well thats what the Nazis figured when they invented the stuff...
I heard that the Nazis developed methadone because they wanted a pain killer that wouldn't be as addictive as other opiates.
They figured that if they made the side effects sufficiently horrible, people wouldn't get addicted to it.
How wrong they were...
In a democracy, the politicians who are voted for are not the people who are in power. The people who are in power in democracy are those who arrange for favorable or unfavorable media representations of those politicians.
The act of voting in a democracy changes nothing, in terms of the distribution of political power. It is pure theater. Not because voting for this or that political actor wouldn't change anything but because to bring about real change via vote depends on statistically significant numbers of people acting in concert. But advertising -- media manipulation of public opinion -- works just as well for political parties as it does for soft drinks and fast food. People are, in general and en masse, highly susceptible to suggestion.
Any political actor who might bring about political change which 'the media' would not like are effectively destroyed by either negative advertising or lack of positive advertising.
Tangent: when they did switch, the democracy was apparently under immediate attack. Some UK newpaper barons from neighbouring island (the Barclay Brothers, who own the Telegraph newspaper) threw their weight behind the democracy campaign and put up a candidate. They have subsequently been accused of using their muscle as a local employer to punish and manipulate the population (who voted for someone other than the Brothers' preferred candidate). A thoroughly surreal situation and bizarre to think of a state the size of a very small town / large village immediately under attack by commercial interests and pressures!
Thats exactly what democracy does; it empowers commercial interests (especially media) to take control of government. Virtually all democracies are immediately subverted by corporate control over the means by which the population forms opinions on how to spend their vote. Democracy is the favored form of government in capitalism because it places political control alongside control of capital.
Most of the 'anglo saxon' cultures are fucked up in very similar ways.
From the USA where a snow sculpture of the Venus di Milo resulted in a visit from the police "either cover it up or take it down", evidently it was 'indecent'.
To the UK where a hairdresser had to take down an advertisement featuring his wife sporting one of his hairstyles because it 'showed too much cleavage'.
The only people more stuffy are the Arabs.
(to us Australians who aren't afraid of the human body, this seem pants on head retarded).
Is that the same Australia where a couple were arrested, tried and convicted for having sex in the lounge of their house, not visible from the street? When an off duty cop entered their garden 'looking for his lost dog' and saw them through the window?
View them in google earth and check historical images.
Some interesting things show up for example you can see the 'crazy white lines' under construction. There are also a few other marked areas nearby that seem similar. One of them looks very old.
The concentric circles with planes is interesting too; there was another aircraft there a few years ago but its been removed.
"but in the US there is freedom after speech."
Unless you didn't have a state issued permit or said something negative about a business that cost them money (even if true). Or if an emotionally unstable did something emotionally unstable in response to your words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
theres your 'free speech' right there, in that cage designated for the purpose.
I bet that China, unlike the USA, doesn't have special caged and protected 'Free Speech Zones' where protesters can stand, out of harms way, and exercise their right to free speech.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Personally, I think that hypocrisy is a perfectly normal human frailty. Everyone is guilty of it to some extent, its not even worth criticising someone for.
I would say that US is more pathetic. At least China keeps it within their own region. US takes it everywhere with ACTA, DMCA and actually making Verisign and ICANN remove domains for copyright infringement. China filters and doesn't affect other countries.
Don't forget drone attacks. "Ooops sorry our drone blew up the people at that wedding reception."
ok so any 'regime' (democratic or otherwise) which "Acts first, apologizes later" is pathetic?
Cos that applies to a lot of them including ones that some may hold in high esteem such as the USA for example.
I agree that some implementations of microtransactions suck but think about this:
Do you play WoW every single day? I don't.
In order to play WoW at all I need to pay for a 30 day subscription. But what if I only want to play for a few weeks every few months?
Shouldn't there be a way for me to pay for my WoW game time in smaller chunks than 30 days?
If Blizzard offered a way to pay 'by the minute' would that be bad for the game?
I can imagine that some would argue that this would encourage the 'casuals' and ruin the game for the truly dedicated players who really do play every single day month after month.
But the modern game industry increasingly caters to normal people, not just dedicated gamers. I think thats good because I don't consider myself 'a gamer' just an ordinary guy who is interested in MMOs, just not 'dedicated' to them.
Representative democracy only works when people pay attention to government, and vote accordingly. When was the last time you voted or even contacted your representative based on copyright? I never have. Maybe I should, but there are other things I care about more.
Most people vote based on what they are told by the media. A minority of people vote based on properly informed and developed opinion.
Democracy is subject to the same 'forces', the same social manipulations and psychology, that underlie advertising. Advertising works and is well worth the billions that are spent on it. Advertising works just as well for 'informing' the public on how they should vote as it does for getting products off of the shelf.
Therefore 'representative' democracy will always be representative of the will of easily manipulated people who are fed false information. Well-informed political debate and dialectic are kept as far away from democracy as possible.
The biggest difference is that we seriously lack any aliens trying to skew things into their own agenda when it comes to astrophysics.
Perhaps setting back our understanding of physics by somehow tampering with our experiments to constantly prove Einstein 'right' about the impossibility of exceeding the speed of light suits their agenda just fine. Ie by keeping us locked up in this solar system...
If you chart the US budget deficit for the last 30+ years and put it up next to the military spending you get a fairly good correspondence most years. Many years the US would run a surplus without the military sucking the blood out of the budget.
How cowardly does Washington have to be that they need to spend more money on the military than every other country in the world combined to "defend" themselves?
Its ok, the USA can just borrow some more money from China to fund its war machine.
God could have created the universe with an infinite past; just because God created the universe doesn't mean that there has to be a 'starting point' in time which us humans can point to as 'creation'. God is bigger than time, so to speak.
If we define religion as the belief in an omnipotent entity / entities that can never be wrong, and whose smallest whim is the absolute word of law
This would only capture a minute fraction of actual religion and then mostly the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic part. Most religions in human history have had gods as fallible and definitely not all-knowing.
I prefer it that way, myself. I detest the "God is ALWAYS right, totally perfect, omnipotent and all knowing and therefore my religion is CORRECT on absolutely EVERYTHING and *your* religion is a stinking pile of doggy doo." attitude of monotheists.
Pantheists tend to be a little more tolerant; after all the gods can be wrong so hey... maybe these other people who believe in other gods could be right.
As a British Subject, I'd love to see actual examples of an ASBO being issued for criticism of the government...
Because it's something I've never heard of.
You think the press would be allowed to report on it if it did happen? Super injunctions? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunction#UK_superinjunctions
Anyone knowing anything about such an ASBO would be under threat of being 'disappeared' if it ever came to light.
The greatest threat facing Western civilization today is our own governments "protecting" us from perceived threats.
The greatest threat facing any child is the protection of its parents.
Life needs risk, challenge, consequences. 'Only danger can keep you safe from harm', so the poem goes.