Again, I have no problem with that - it's the use of fear as a tool that I find distasteful. More alarmingly, it just screams "I have a hidden agenda!" If Assange were making statements that sounded as reasonable as yours, I wouldn't be having this discussion with you:)
Also, I think his comments are directed more towards non-US people. The US can lawfully spy on anyone they want outside of the country. Inside, they need warrants. Since all worldwide Facebook data eventually transits to the US, I imagine that the US government could grab all of that that they want - though they still have to watch it so they don't wind up in another AT&T wiretapping controversy.
It is "Spying" though, and I don't doubt that the Government are using their access for individuals information as well as aggregate information of the population as a whole.
It's not "spying", but I don't really care what you call it. First, I'd love to know what his source is - law enforcement should be getting warrants for any domestic surveillance. Second, I'm not putting my information on Facebook for the benefit of the government, terrorists, divorce lawyers, advertisers, or anyone except my friends. That others find it useful is a side effect of having such a useful thing. For most of us with reasonable governments, having a huge database where I can find, contact, and keep up with all my friends far outweighs any kind of danger of data mining by others. And if I did live in some place with an authoritarian government where I might think twice about putting my friendships online, there are dozens of other ways they could locate me and spy on me, with varying degrees of difficulty.
Hyperbole is a matter of opinion, I think the problems of Facebook have been underblown, not exaggerated; and Assange is right to bring this up - no-one else is in the mainstream media.
Then we disagree. Facebook cannot exist without the information they collect. That it is the most popular site on the internet just screams how useful people find it. That a giant database containing relationships is useful is more of a boring restating of the obvious - not an OMG NOW THE GOVERNMENT CAN SPY ON US! No one else is bringing this up because it is ridiculous.
Shouldn't that be something to be at least slightly aware of?
Yes - I would never object to educating people to real dangers. When he starts talking about "spying" and "government", he's being disingenuous and full of hyperbole. As you yourself pointed out, the largest threat most people face from Facebook is blowback from stuff their boss or friends don't like that they made public.
I don't think Assange is doing a bad thing by warning people; in fact, it's a fairly honourable thing for him to do.
Except that he's warning them about the wrong thing. The ignorant sort of people you are indicating is his target audience are far more at risk from Nigerian scammers and phishing attacks then from some big brother threat. He's not interested in these people at all, other than it seems scaring them furthers some kind of agenda of his. I have no idea what his agenda is, but scare tactics are pretty textbook.
how many people thinks that they are helping a poor guy in Congo getting his heritage money safe by giving them their bank account numbers? How many people agree to "share" a video link on facebook to be able to see a stupid video of a girl having an orgasm while doing the SlingShot and are not realizing that they are giving access to their data to whoever put that online?
A tiny fraction of the population - but with big numbers of internet users, even a tiny fraction is a lot of people.
The people that you are talking about aren't going to have any idea what Assange is talking about. They certainly aren't going to know who he is or why they should listen to him. And frankly, the last thing those idiots need to worry about is the government. Talking about the big scary government boogyman is also not the mark of an honest guy. Generally people using that line are just trying to scare people to promote some kind of an agenda. Think a politician saying "the democrats/republicans are trying to take away your social security" to a bunch of seniors. It's laughable on the face of it, but they say it because it promotes their agenda.
but I'm not a big fan of people not realising how much of their personal and private information they're putting up online.
Isn't that just a little condescending? When people put their address into a web form, I think they understand that it is going "online". It's like warning people that putting their listing in the phone book will give the government access to their address and phone number. I think if you asked people whether they thought the government could get their hands on the data that you put into facebook, most people would answer yes. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but if most people know that the government can tap your phone and fly helicopters into other countries to kill people, they can certainly pull data from a website.
But all he did is restate what people already know about Facebook using scary words.
Why do people use Facebook? There are many reasons, but for most "so people I wouldn't keep in constant touch with can find me" would be on their list of reasons. Does that include the government? Yes. Are most people hiding from the government? No. Can the government see your whole list of friends? Yes - only most people would just say that ANYONE can see your whole list of friends.
I'm not sure what he's up to, but I'm not a big fan of people using fear for their own agenda.
The company as a whole is responsible for any of its failures.
I completely disagree. "The company" does not actually exist - it is actually just a group of individuals. If an individual can mess up the whole infrastructure, then I'd sure like to know that.
A better PR response
Yup, a better BS response that leaves them just as opaque as all the other companies out there.
An engineer may have caused this outage but I would find it hard to believe that replacing the engineer would make the "risk" go away.
That's exactly right - but you wouldn't know that if they had said "we made an unscheduled change". I prefer their transparency.
Oh, I agree. Further, as a one-time intern using a glorious 486SX, I would absolutely have stuck some RAM in the damn thing if it only cost $15. At the time, a sorely-needed 4MB module was beyond my budget:) I remember looking enviously at the engineers with their shiny new P5-90s and Windows 95. The cool ones would let me use those when they weren't on them.
So, rather than actually do a half hour worth of calculation, you think it's more effective to just pull random numbers out of the air to justify doing whatever you want. Good advice.
Except for the "random numbers" part, yes - that is my advice. I'd love to see you do a detailed analysis without knowing even what his job is. If it makes him a little more productive, it's hundreds of dollars. If it makes him vastly more productive, it's thousands of dollars. He could be a freaking web designer or he could be surfing for game cheats. He could be scraping twitter using Firefox for emails to spam - I have absolutely no idea.
I don't know what the company does, but I strongly doubt that an incrementally faster web browser actually saves hundreds or thousands of dollars over a 3-month internship.
Our company has 6-month internships, and the interns do the bulk of the data analysis. Like you, I have no idea what his job entails - so it's probably in the hundreds. Or maybe he's full of it and just wants a faster computer, in which case he won't improve his efficiency at all. But I'm giving the guy some credit.
If you don't set limits on the freeloading your company is allowed to engage in, you're doing yourself a disservice.
Interns are there to be exploited and abused. I was an intern, and they threw me into 72 hour weeks. I didn't mind, because it was good experience and they paid by the hour. In college this seemed like money from the sky, and as a side benefit I didn't have any personal time to spend it.
You are there for the resume building and recommendation letters, and possibly a permanent job offer - not so set the corporate world straight. That comes later.
I just read this, and it sounds harsh. If I come off as being harsh, consider that we regularly get interns back for 2 and 3 cycles. We also primarily hire from our former interns - so I'm not really that bad in meatspace.
I'm sorry to contradict you, because you seem very smart and you have a well-reasoned and thought out rationalle.
But at the end of the day, there are really two scenarios: 1. The rogue route where he sticks a $15 stick of RAM in an old POS machine that is worth only a bit more than that. Best case, he is more productive and saves the company hundreds or even thousands of dollars (depending on the productivity increase, natch). Worst case, he damages the old POS machine - which is of course fully depreciated by now. Maybe this costs the company a couple hundred bucks, even including IT time? 2. The route you propose. He spends a few hours at intern rate putting together a proposal. Management time is spent considering his proposal. Best case? He doesn't actually create a proposal but just tells his manager that the computer is too slow and gets a stick of RAM. Cost to the company is maybe $50-100 (RAM + PO handling + IT installation) and he saves the company hundreds or thousands of dollars. Worst case, he's spent a few hundred bucks of the company's money on his own time, the time of his manager, and the time of IT and still doesn't get his RAM, so he's still less productive to boot.
I'm sorry, but when I do the cost-benefit on that, I have to choose 1... if I'm willing to give the company $15.
Being able to compile Windows applications under Linux can make that a lot easier, whereas the fact that Mac applications can only be compiled on Macs is a huge pain...
You are clearly open to tools like Wine. Can't you use a tool like GnuStep to cross-compile to OSX from Linux? It sounds like a huge pain in the ass vs. just having an old headless Mac to run a compiler on, but you could put it together if you wanted to stay purely open source.
Just to be pedantic, "Linux" doesn't necessarily use repositories. It's common, but not part of the kernel. Android runs on Linux, and Apple runs on Mach/BSD - so all the kernels here are open source.
That said, the whole idea of a repository is to make life easier for the user. Apple's original method with no user-installable apps is on one extreme end of a continuum. At some point they made the device harder to operate but gave the user more freedom by adding a single, tightly guarded repository. Rooted or more open Android phones allow you to add more than one repository, so you increase the skill level required to operate the device by some degree and in return you get even more freedom.
I don't see what the big deal is - you buy the device that suits your own needs.
Yep, if the Chinese government have 400B USD leftover at the end of the year and they're tired of buying everyone else's debt, I see no wrong in building luxurious council estates
You seem to think that they have a choice, or that they are just being prudent with their balance sheet. In reality, they HAVE to buy that debt to inflate their currency. Otherwise their currency would get strong, and - uh, oh, Western companies might go elsewhere for cheap labor.
(I presume you are talking about the fringe who want to put creationism in the curriculum, not sure what your history reference is)
That was certainly egg on the face of Texas, but is not what I'm angry about. Look up their history revisionism and how it effects everyone else's textbooks, since Texas is such a big market.
You are giving Texas an unfair representation based on a few high profile non-stories.
I'm actually not the one giving them a bad rep. They do a fine job of that themselves. Textbooks all over the country (especially history textbooks) suck just a little bit more because of Texas.
We risk letting greed destroy us, I can't put it more plainly than that.
I agree with your sentiment, but the social conservatives are not simply focusing on the individual - they also have a very well-founded distrust of these same government structures that social liberals would espouse. History is replete with examples of very strong governments where the "wrong" people get in charge and use the strong institutions for nefarious purposes.
To turn it around, let's say that social liberals somehow manage to slam a strong national education system into place, complete with a support system that tries to help kids with bad parents. Then, as is often the case, the religious right come to power. What do you think the curriculum will look like all of the sudden?:) For a preview, there is Texas and Kansas...
I don't know what the answer is, but strong government isn't all roses.
Yeah, in the "hundreds of millions of years" kind of timeframe. It's just that I'd like to advance our scientific knowledge as much as possible while we can afford to. I know we are having a bit of a rough patch, but we are still at a point of just staggering scientific capacity, and I'd love to exploit that as long as we can. Who knows what the future brings? We may not have a continuous 2 billion years of prosperity to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
Whats your problem with raising awareness?
Again, I have no problem with that - it's the use of fear as a tool that I find distasteful. More alarmingly, it just screams "I have a hidden agenda!" If Assange were making statements that sounded as reasonable as yours, I wouldn't be having this discussion with you :)
Also, I think his comments are directed more towards non-US people. The US can lawfully spy on anyone they want outside of the country. Inside, they need warrants. Since all worldwide Facebook data eventually transits to the US, I imagine that the US government could grab all of that that they want - though they still have to watch it so they don't wind up in another AT&T wiretapping controversy.
It is "Spying" though, and I don't doubt that the Government are using their access for individuals information as well as aggregate information of the population as a whole.
It's not "spying", but I don't really care what you call it. First, I'd love to know what his source is - law enforcement should be getting warrants for any domestic surveillance. Second, I'm not putting my information on Facebook for the benefit of the government, terrorists, divorce lawyers, advertisers, or anyone except my friends. That others find it useful is a side effect of having such a useful thing. For most of us with reasonable governments, having a huge database where I can find, contact, and keep up with all my friends far outweighs any kind of danger of data mining by others. And if I did live in some place with an authoritarian government where I might think twice about putting my friendships online, there are dozens of other ways they could locate me and spy on me, with varying degrees of difficulty.
Hyperbole is a matter of opinion, I think the problems of Facebook have been underblown, not exaggerated; and Assange is right to bring this up - no-one else is in the mainstream media.
Then we disagree. Facebook cannot exist without the information they collect. That it is the most popular site on the internet just screams how useful people find it. That a giant database containing relationships is useful is more of a boring restating of the obvious - not an OMG NOW THE GOVERNMENT CAN SPY ON US! No one else is bringing this up because it is ridiculous.
Shouldn't that be something to be at least slightly aware of?
Yes - I would never object to educating people to real dangers. When he starts talking about "spying" and "government", he's being disingenuous and full of hyperbole. As you yourself pointed out, the largest threat most people face from Facebook is blowback from stuff their boss or friends don't like that they made public.
I don't think Assange is doing a bad thing by warning people; in fact, it's a fairly honourable thing for him to do.
Except that he's warning them about the wrong thing. The ignorant sort of people you are indicating is his target audience are far more at risk from Nigerian scammers and phishing attacks then from some big brother threat. He's not interested in these people at all, other than it seems scaring them furthers some kind of agenda of his. I have no idea what his agenda is, but scare tactics are pretty textbook.
how many people thinks that they are helping a poor guy in Congo getting his heritage money safe by giving them their bank account numbers? How many people agree to "share" a video link on facebook to be able to see a stupid video of a girl having an orgasm while doing the SlingShot and are not realizing that they are giving access to their data to whoever put that online?
A tiny fraction of the population - but with big numbers of internet users, even a tiny fraction is a lot of people.
The people that you are talking about aren't going to have any idea what Assange is talking about. They certainly aren't going to know who he is or why they should listen to him. And frankly, the last thing those idiots need to worry about is the government. Talking about the big scary government boogyman is also not the mark of an honest guy. Generally people using that line are just trying to scare people to promote some kind of an agenda. Think a politician saying "the democrats/republicans are trying to take away your social security" to a bunch of seniors. It's laughable on the face of it, but they say it because it promotes their agenda.
but I'm not a big fan of people not realising how much of their personal and private information they're putting up online.
Isn't that just a little condescending? When people put their address into a web form, I think they understand that it is going "online". It's like warning people that putting their listing in the phone book will give the government access to their address and phone number. I think if you asked people whether they thought the government could get their hands on the data that you put into facebook, most people would answer yes. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but if most people know that the government can tap your phone and fly helicopters into other countries to kill people, they can certainly pull data from a website.
But all he did is restate what people already know about Facebook using scary words.
Why do people use Facebook? There are many reasons, but for most "so people I wouldn't keep in constant touch with can find me" would be on their list of reasons. Does that include the government? Yes. Are most people hiding from the government? No. Can the government see your whole list of friends? Yes - only most people would just say that ANYONE can see your whole list of friends.
I'm not sure what he's up to, but I'm not a big fan of people using fear for their own agenda.
The company as a whole is responsible for any of its failures.
I completely disagree. "The company" does not actually exist - it is actually just a group of individuals. If an individual can mess up the whole infrastructure, then I'd sure like to know that.
A better PR response
Yup, a better BS response that leaves them just as opaque as all the other companies out there.
An engineer may have caused this outage but I would find it hard to believe that replacing the engineer would make the "risk" go away.
That's exactly right - but you wouldn't know that if they had said "we made an unscheduled change". I prefer their transparency.
Oh, I agree. Further, as a one-time intern using a glorious 486SX, I would absolutely have stuck some RAM in the damn thing if it only cost $15. At the time, a sorely-needed 4MB module was beyond my budget :) I remember looking enviously at the engineers with their shiny new P5-90s and Windows 95. The cool ones would let me use those when they weren't on them.
So, rather than actually do a half hour worth of calculation, you think it's more effective to just pull random numbers out of the air to justify doing whatever you want. Good advice.
Except for the "random numbers" part, yes - that is my advice. I'd love to see you do a detailed analysis without knowing even what his job is. If it makes him a little more productive, it's hundreds of dollars. If it makes him vastly more productive, it's thousands of dollars. He could be a freaking web designer or he could be surfing for game cheats. He could be scraping twitter using Firefox for emails to spam - I have absolutely no idea.
I don't know what the company does, but I strongly doubt that an incrementally faster web browser actually saves hundreds or thousands of dollars over a 3-month internship.
Our company has 6-month internships, and the interns do the bulk of the data analysis. Like you, I have no idea what his job entails - so it's probably in the hundreds. Or maybe he's full of it and just wants a faster computer, in which case he won't improve his efficiency at all. But I'm giving the guy some credit.
If you don't set limits on the freeloading your company is allowed to engage in, you're doing yourself a disservice.
Interns are there to be exploited and abused. I was an intern, and they threw me into 72 hour weeks. I didn't mind, because it was good experience and they paid by the hour. In college this seemed like money from the sky, and as a side benefit I didn't have any personal time to spend it.
You are there for the resume building and recommendation letters, and possibly a permanent job offer - not so set the corporate world straight. That comes later.
I just read this, and it sounds harsh. If I come off as being harsh, consider that we regularly get interns back for 2 and 3 cycles. We also primarily hire from our former interns - so I'm not really that bad in meatspace.
I'm sorry to contradict you, because you seem very smart and you have a well-reasoned and thought out rationalle.
But at the end of the day, there are really two scenarios:
1. The rogue route where he sticks a $15 stick of RAM in an old POS machine that is worth only a bit more than that. Best case, he is more productive and saves the company hundreds or even thousands of dollars (depending on the productivity increase, natch). Worst case, he damages the old POS machine - which is of course fully depreciated by now. Maybe this costs the company a couple hundred bucks, even including IT time?
2. The route you propose. He spends a few hours at intern rate putting together a proposal. Management time is spent considering his proposal. Best case? He doesn't actually create a proposal but just tells his manager that the computer is too slow and gets a stick of RAM. Cost to the company is maybe $50-100 (RAM + PO handling + IT installation) and he saves the company hundreds or thousands of dollars. Worst case, he's spent a few hundred bucks of the company's money on his own time, the time of his manager, and the time of IT and still doesn't get his RAM, so he's still less productive to boot.
I'm sorry, but when I do the cost-benefit on that, I have to choose 1... if I'm willing to give the company $15.
You and millions of others. Ain't competition grand? I wish the PC market were still like this.
Being able to compile Windows applications under Linux can make that a lot easier, whereas the fact that Mac applications can only be compiled on Macs is a huge pain...
You are clearly open to tools like Wine. Can't you use a tool like GnuStep to cross-compile to OSX from Linux? It sounds like a huge pain in the ass vs. just having an old headless Mac to run a compiler on, but you could put it together if you wanted to stay purely open source.
Yes. Slavery is freedom. Perfect Apple Newspeak.
So you've read 1984? Wow.
Most people recognize that political freedom is a lot more important than freedom to run a certain app on a toy.
Just to be pedantic, "Linux" doesn't necessarily use repositories. It's common, but not part of the kernel. Android runs on Linux, and Apple runs on Mach/BSD - so all the kernels here are open source.
That said, the whole idea of a repository is to make life easier for the user. Apple's original method with no user-installable apps is on one extreme end of a continuum. At some point they made the device harder to operate but gave the user more freedom by adding a single, tightly guarded repository. Rooted or more open Android phones allow you to add more than one repository, so you increase the skill level required to operate the device by some degree and in return you get even more freedom.
I don't see what the big deal is - you buy the device that suits your own needs.
My tablet has to run Whoosh 2.0.
The reason TX has so much power when it comes to textbooks is that TX isn't in debt.
I don't really care why they have so much power - only that they use this power to ruin history as a subject for so many kids.
Yep, if the Chinese government have 400B USD leftover at the end of the year and they're tired of buying everyone else's debt, I see no wrong in building luxurious council estates
You seem to think that they have a choice, or that they are just being prudent with their balance sheet. In reality, they HAVE to buy that debt to inflate their currency. Otherwise their currency would get strong, and - uh, oh, Western companies might go elsewhere for cheap labor.
(I presume you are talking about the fringe who want to put creationism in the curriculum, not sure what your history reference is)
That was certainly egg on the face of Texas, but is not what I'm angry about. Look up their history revisionism and how it effects everyone else's textbooks, since Texas is such a big market.
You are giving Texas an unfair representation based on a few high profile non-stories.
I'm actually not the one giving them a bad rep. They do a fine job of that themselves. Textbooks all over the country (especially history textbooks) suck just a little bit more because of Texas.
We risk letting greed destroy us, I can't put it more plainly than that.
I agree with your sentiment, but the social conservatives are not simply focusing on the individual - they also have a very well-founded distrust of these same government structures that social liberals would espouse. History is replete with examples of very strong governments where the "wrong" people get in charge and use the strong institutions for nefarious purposes.
To turn it around, let's say that social liberals somehow manage to slam a strong national education system into place, complete with a support system that tries to help kids with bad parents. Then, as is often the case, the religious right come to power. What do you think the curriculum will look like all of the sudden? :) For a preview, there is Texas and Kansas...
I don't know what the answer is, but strong government isn't all roses.
Forgot about that. It's still not piracy :)
Within the next 2 billion years perhaps.
Yeah, in the "hundreds of millions of years" kind of timeframe. It's just that I'd like to advance our scientific knowledge as much as possible while we can afford to. I know we are having a bit of a rough patch, but we are still at a point of just staggering scientific capacity, and I'd love to exploit that as long as we can. Who knows what the future brings? We may not have a continuous 2 billion years of prosperity to work with.