Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn from time to time.
It sounds to me like the Distinguished Gentleman from Texas should continue to serve as a Senator, where as an idea-man his ideas can be presented and debated, and the good ones considered for real implementation, and where bad ones could be decided against.
I suspect that this is largely true, but low skill (e.g. entry level, or just bad) programmers are probably going to have a much harder time making a living doing this kind of work than an experienced programmer, given that they are paid by the project rather than hourly. I imagine the stress of finishing projects fast enough to earn a decent living would be a pretty inhospitable environment for those programmers. If it's possible to make a decent living for low skilled programmers, then it would also be possible for a high skilled programmer to make a fortune.
It depends on the customer really. One thing that I've learned through the years doing technical services is that companies that charge the least get the worst and least-educated customers. The business can possibly make a profit if overhead is kept down and if volume is kept up, but it's very hard on the end-worker at times when they're getting crapped on from both the boss and from the customer. On the other hand, an ignorant customer can be strung-along for a lot longer than an educated customer and in the end might pay the same through excess hours than if they had gone with the skilled, more expensive organization from the outset.
In this case of code-for-hire if the customer has an idea for something or has a need for a software for a special purpose, they might not be knowledgeable enough to know how to shop around for a good developer. They could end up with one, or they could look for an on-paper cheaper developer but end up having to approve cost-overruns and other unforeseen expenses. Don't forget, part of typical boiler-plate contracts is that until paid the developer owns the code; I've known of cases where the customer wouldn't or couldn't pay and the developer actually went into the customer's business to profit off of the code that he wrote.
It'll be an interesting market to watch. Could be good, or could be crap.
I can't even hire a nanny without becoming an employer who provides benefits like paid time off and payroll taxes, etc. I am not an employer, I don;t want to do any of that shit.
The solution is to contact a service company that does those tasks, and you pay the company for the privilege of doing those necessary business functions for you plus their profit, plus the funds that ultimately become the wages and benefits for the worker.
The real solution is to decouple healthcare from employment though. Make healthcare a function of a single-payer system and suddenly both the employer and the employee are much freer. A person hiring a nanny or au pair or other full-time care individual doesn't have to deal with the constantly-shifting nature of medical insurance coverage and only has to worry about following a prewritten withholdings plan that their accountant can figure out in a few minutes, and the individual employed isn't damn-near indentured to the employer just to keep the prescriptions coming.
Yes, it requires more taxes to be paid than are being paid now. But, it probably reduces the total cost compared to the insurance situation now because a lot of the massive, parasitic bureaucracy operated by both the medical companies and the medical insurance companies can be simplified. Sure, those whose jobs to push paperwork for claims will probably have to find other lines of work, but this isn't the first time that a middleman position has been eliminated and it won't be the last.
I suspect that in the case of entites like the one discussed in the article, they appeal to entry-level programmers that don't have a lot of experience to use to get hired, and who are still nominally dependent on their parents and haven't really ventured out on their own yet. They can afford to be intermittendly unemployed and they might still receive benefits through other means. That's a luxury that most of us don't have.
This is my main problem with the Raspberry Pi. It's very well suited to certain tasks. But there are many places where it falls behind even very old technology.
That's my biggest beef with it. It feels like a learning-computer to me, something for a student to use to study very specific aspects of system design. A physical counterpart to Minix. Yet it seems to be touted as something more capable than that.
What I need in low-end is beyond the capabilities of this device. I'm willing to accept the power consumption penalty of old equipment because I know that the old equipment won't let me down. The Raspberry Pi could be free but if it doesn't do what I need then it is useless to me.
On the other hand, in the United States, the people in charge of each Federal Reserve branch are government-appointed, and they are supposed to, in part, work toward the interests of the United States.
Persons in charge of a scrip like Bitcoin are not working in the interests of a national government to our knowledge, nor are they government appointed. If anything, they are working for themselves. They may have an altruistic streak about them, but they do not answer to anyone, nor are there even so much as terms in office that force them to stop working with the scrip at some point.
Kinda makes me wonder about that initial founding block of bitcoins that has never been used, and if this person has necessary information to actually access that block, what the legal issues for that would be for both him and for that initial unused block. Some have cited that block as part of the reason why bitcoin is reasonably stable, but if that block now somehow became Australia's property and if they chose to start spending it, what that would do to the scrip.
Krebs says of a law enforcement source of his: "The criminals running the fraud shop seized his carding store account and bitcoin balance after the pig alert flashed on my source's screen — effectively stealing hundreds of taxpayer dollars directly from the authorities..."
I think it's hilarious that the angle they took was the seizing of the police's resources committed to the transaction system. The point wasn't to steal the police's resources, that was a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the operation. The point was to prevent the suspected law enforcement agency from continuing to play and to preserve the information that might be linked with the account to use that information to help spot other law enforcement accounts.
If anything, the lack of size of the law enforcement operation was probably the initial red flag. Sure, actual criminals will start out small too, but usually an unwillingness to go all-in is a warning flag. Flat out, usually the, "good guys," have limits on their behavior either because they're attempting to do as little harm as possible or being limited in funding since they're not actually running a criminal for-profit enterprise, or a combination thereof.
It'll probably take a turned-insider to break this stuff. That's what it usually takes. Actually find a person involved, use the carrot-and-stick approach to give them reduced charges or some degree of immunity in exchange for breaking the organization from within, and let that person both take the risks associated with data collection and give them time to build up enough information to make further prosecution possible.
Compaq was cleared of a similar accusation for a much more blatant "ripoff" when they used two teams to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS, basically duplicating the functions of the IBM CMOS and BIOS while buying ALL of the other chips in the computer off-the-shelf to make a function-alike copy for hundreds of dollars less.
Do you demonize Compaq and all of the other companies like American Megatrends, Phoenix, and Award for their clones and extensions derived from the original IBM PC BIOS?
If Creative Labs bought off-the-shelf hardware that anyone could purchase, used both existing and documented means for that off-the-shelf hardware to work with existing software through using addresses known to reach that hardware (remember, no special software!), and also in time wrote their own improved software, is that a bad thing?
It strikes me that the most useful argument for this kind of surveillance would be just-in-time collection and analysis of highly sensitive targets' communication. In reality, what it seems we have is bulk data collection of nearly everyone, stored for later use. That kind of collection serves an entirely different purpose.
Absolutely. In Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith put things down the Memory Hole that he and everyone else thought led to an incinerator. In reality it was the perfect way to collect everything that anyone thought was sensitive enough to need to be destroyed thoroughly. That information was later used against Winston.
Entrapment requires compelling someone to do something that they would not have done without the investigation compelling them to do it. Distasteful as it is for FBI agents to provide fake bombs and blank ammunition to those that are disgruntled so that they attempt to attack and fail and can be busted for stronger charges, the individuals that chose to take the materials and carry out the attack did so of their own free will, and thus is not entrapment.
It starts becoming unclear when the attacker is given planning assistance by the agents, as it calls into question if they'd even be capable of doing such an act without more help than supply assistance. If the investigators put them into the position where they must carry out the attack or there will be real consequences then that definitely is entrapment.
Its about having big balls -- the bold reap rewards.
We've got a lot of big talkers around here. This guy actually walked the walk instead of just pretending to be bold from the safety of his mom's basement. The band admired the guy's chutzpah and rewarded him for it. That's the lesson here.
Heh. I got myself off of a particular telemarketing firm's call list a while back; they were actually a local company pushing "the go green campaign" and I was able to glean enough information out of the caller to figure out the name of the real company. I used that information to find the name of the owner on Linked In and I then used his name to find his contact information, based on some stuff he'd handed out at a trade show or something. I called him at dinner time on his personal phone and we had a little chat about his company calling despite my repeated insistence that they stop; never heard from them after that ever again.
Someone further removed wouldn't have had any chance to be let in. Granted, on the face of it this didn't work either (any security guard better not let someone in that's not on the approved list) but someone further removed than direct household member wouldn't be granted access as a matter of course.
The reality distortion field generator is on the fritz. The yearly upgrade cycle business model is failing.
It's been about four years since Steve Jobs died. I'm still not exactly sure how, but that man was very, very good at reading what the public wanted even before the public knew what it wanted, and to then act as a filter within the company to provide products that fit those wants. Apple without Steve Jobs struggled before when he was released from the company when they attempted to go low-cost and mass-market, and Apple without Steve Jobs now appears to be making design missteps that no longer lead what the public wants to the degree that it once did.
I don't think that Apple will continue to stay in the position in the market that it once enjoyed. It will probably still have successful products, it will probably continue to remain profitable, but I expect that Apple will have more duds on average than it used to have. Hell, eventually it might even slip to being just another tech company albeit with its own software instead of with someone else's. We'll just have to see.
You get way better intelligence by allowing use of these resources. Additionally any attempt to disrupt use will inevitably prevent some legitimate use.
This argument only works for foes like the Germans with their Enigma and Lorenz machines during World War II, where the size of the foe's organization means that the foe is able to adapt when their existing technologies are disrupted. State-level military operations that are essentially at parity with one's own operations cannot be completely shut down or permanently disrupted so easily.
For non-state entities like terror organizations, disrupting their command and control and other communications might actually break real operations, and might even help serve to change the nature of those that would sympathize with them. Remember, there have been cases where law enforcement, not criminal entities, managed to contact and provide means and encouragement to disgruntled individuals that motivated them to act. It's not legally entrapment, but without communication, encouragement, and means, would these people have attempted to commit acts?
One has to wonder about the effectiveness of all of the monitoring that we've all been so perturbed by. We've had attacks in Paris and in San Bernadino where unencrypted communications were used and the attacks were not disrupted. This foe, while not insignificant, is small enough that using their communications to disrupt their acts should be very effective, but it's not proving effective. If it's not effective, then what's the whole damn point? This isn't World War II where the stakes for the enemy learning of the interception would mean that interception would end.
"Earth Sugardrink" when talking about whatever the most popular human soda is.
I'm adopting this expression. Hell, we should all adopt this expression, so maybe we'll drink less of it and actually enjoy it more when we do have it...
This is even better than prison. At least i think so. In prison, they can hide their shame from the world at large. Now, half the man (or less) and subjected to publicity they walk among the people they once abused. What better way for the fickle hands of fate to deal the next hand?
I've known people like the subject of the article. You're not thinking like they and their peers think. They do not feel shame for their actions nor do they feel shame for being subjected to punishment for them. They feel their actions are legitimate and they feel anger directed toward those that have thwarted them, and actions like the court has taken only stiffen their resolve.
People like this need to be put into jail if they're to actually learn. People like this that continue to have their freedom are still free to pursue more of these kinds of schemes because they've seen how little the consequences, really, are for them. Left like this, with some means, they're going to simply repeat the pattern that we've already seen.
Embarrassment on the streets? Walking among those they abused? Do you feel like everyone is watching you on the streets? Do you feel like the entire community knows who you are or even cares? Hell, criminals that have inflicted violence on others and been convicted semi-anonymously walk the streets and no one really knows what they've done or how that could mean that they are riskier than others; copyright trolls are less of a danger and far less directly impacting on the local community and will easily avoid any sort of public shame during the course of their days.
This is a victory, but it's hollow one and only one more battle, not the end of the war.
You'd be better off removing the polarized film from an LCD panel and installing that film on a pair of glasses. You'd have a monitor that only you could see.
I donno, I have an awful lot of fun in my '95 Impala, and it's bigger than and just as heavy as anything else on the road today short of a full-sized truck.
Slashdot Mirror
Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn from time to time.
It sounds to me like the Distinguished Gentleman from Texas should continue to serve as a Senator, where as an idea-man his ideas can be presented and debated, and the good ones considered for real implementation, and where bad ones could be decided against.
I suspect that this is largely true, but low skill (e.g. entry level, or just bad) programmers are probably going to have a much harder time making a living doing this kind of work than an experienced programmer, given that they are paid by the project rather than hourly. I imagine the stress of finishing projects fast enough to earn a decent living would be a pretty inhospitable environment for those programmers. If it's possible to make a decent living for low skilled programmers, then it would also be possible for a high skilled programmer to make a fortune.
It depends on the customer really. One thing that I've learned through the years doing technical services is that companies that charge the least get the worst and least-educated customers. The business can possibly make a profit if overhead is kept down and if volume is kept up, but it's very hard on the end-worker at times when they're getting crapped on from both the boss and from the customer. On the other hand, an ignorant customer can be strung-along for a lot longer than an educated customer and in the end might pay the same through excess hours than if they had gone with the skilled, more expensive organization from the outset.
In this case of code-for-hire if the customer has an idea for something or has a need for a software for a special purpose, they might not be knowledgeable enough to know how to shop around for a good developer. They could end up with one, or they could look for an on-paper cheaper developer but end up having to approve cost-overruns and other unforeseen expenses. Don't forget, part of typical boiler-plate contracts is that until paid the developer owns the code; I've known of cases where the customer wouldn't or couldn't pay and the developer actually went into the customer's business to profit off of the code that he wrote.
It'll be an interesting market to watch. Could be good, or could be crap.
I can't even hire a nanny without becoming an employer who provides benefits like paid time off and payroll taxes, etc. I am not an employer, I don;t want to do any of that shit.
The solution is to contact a service company that does those tasks, and you pay the company for the privilege of doing those necessary business functions for you plus their profit, plus the funds that ultimately become the wages and benefits for the worker.
The real solution is to decouple healthcare from employment though. Make healthcare a function of a single-payer system and suddenly both the employer and the employee are much freer. A person hiring a nanny or au pair or other full-time care individual doesn't have to deal with the constantly-shifting nature of medical insurance coverage and only has to worry about following a prewritten withholdings plan that their accountant can figure out in a few minutes, and the individual employed isn't damn-near indentured to the employer just to keep the prescriptions coming.
Yes, it requires more taxes to be paid than are being paid now. But, it probably reduces the total cost compared to the insurance situation now because a lot of the massive, parasitic bureaucracy operated by both the medical companies and the medical insurance companies can be simplified. Sure, those whose jobs to push paperwork for claims will probably have to find other lines of work, but this isn't the first time that a middleman position has been eliminated and it won't be the last.
I suspect that in the case of entites like the one discussed in the article, they appeal to entry-level programmers that don't have a lot of experience to use to get hired, and who are still nominally dependent on their parents and haven't really ventured out on their own yet. They can afford to be intermittendly unemployed and they might still receive benefits through other means. That's a luxury that most of us don't have.
This is my main problem with the Raspberry Pi. It's very well suited to certain tasks. But there are many places where it falls behind even very old technology.
That's my biggest beef with it. It feels like a learning-computer to me, something for a student to use to study very specific aspects of system design. A physical counterpart to Minix. Yet it seems to be touted as something more capable than that.
What I need in low-end is beyond the capabilities of this device. I'm willing to accept the power consumption penalty of old equipment because I know that the old equipment won't let me down. The Raspberry Pi could be free but if it doesn't do what I need then it is useless to me.
For big-time crooks, that's the normal mode of operation.
It's only the small-time crooks or the crooks that don't do a good job of taking care of their benefactors that are come-down-upon.
On the other hand, in the United States, the people in charge of each Federal Reserve branch are government-appointed, and they are supposed to, in part, work toward the interests of the United States.
Persons in charge of a scrip like Bitcoin are not working in the interests of a national government to our knowledge, nor are they government appointed. If anything, they are working for themselves. They may have an altruistic streak about them, but they do not answer to anyone, nor are there even so much as terms in office that force them to stop working with the scrip at some point.
Kinda makes me wonder about that initial founding block of bitcoins that has never been used, and if this person has necessary information to actually access that block, what the legal issues for that would be for both him and for that initial unused block. Some have cited that block as part of the reason why bitcoin is reasonably stable, but if that block now somehow became Australia's property and if they chose to start spending it, what that would do to the scrip.
No. Can't remember the last time I posted AC even.
I checked, CaptainDouchebag is still available.
Krebs says of a law enforcement source of his: "The criminals running the fraud shop seized his carding store account and bitcoin balance after the pig alert flashed on my source's screen — effectively stealing hundreds of taxpayer dollars directly from the authorities..."
I think it's hilarious that the angle they took was the seizing of the police's resources committed to the transaction system. The point wasn't to steal the police's resources, that was a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the operation. The point was to prevent the suspected law enforcement agency from continuing to play and to preserve the information that might be linked with the account to use that information to help spot other law enforcement accounts.
If anything, the lack of size of the law enforcement operation was probably the initial red flag. Sure, actual criminals will start out small too, but usually an unwillingness to go all-in is a warning flag. Flat out, usually the, "good guys," have limits on their behavior either because they're attempting to do as little harm as possible or being limited in funding since they're not actually running a criminal for-profit enterprise, or a combination thereof.
It'll probably take a turned-insider to break this stuff. That's what it usually takes. Actually find a person involved, use the carrot-and-stick approach to give them reduced charges or some degree of immunity in exchange for breaking the organization from within, and let that person both take the risks associated with data collection and give them time to build up enough information to make further prosecution possible.
Compaq was cleared of a similar accusation for a much more blatant "ripoff" when they used two teams to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS, basically duplicating the functions of the IBM CMOS and BIOS while buying ALL of the other chips in the computer off-the-shelf to make a function-alike copy for hundreds of dollars less.
Do you demonize Compaq and all of the other companies like American Megatrends, Phoenix, and Award for their clones and extensions derived from the original IBM PC BIOS?
If Creative Labs bought off-the-shelf hardware that anyone could purchase, used both existing and documented means for that off-the-shelf hardware to work with existing software through using addresses known to reach that hardware (remember, no special software!), and also in time wrote their own improved software, is that a bad thing?
Yet the other Creative Labs is still up.
For a moment, I thought "I knew they bought Oculus, but I didn't know about Sound Blaster." Then I read the article.
Makes you wonder if they closed it in part as a response to a legal challenge over trademark...
Might've been me. I have shared it once before.
It strikes me that the most useful argument for this kind of surveillance would be just-in-time collection and analysis of highly sensitive targets' communication. In reality, what it seems we have is bulk data collection of nearly everyone, stored for later use. That kind of collection serves an entirely different purpose.
Absolutely. In Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith put things down the Memory Hole that he and everyone else thought led to an incinerator. In reality it was the perfect way to collect everything that anyone thought was sensitive enough to need to be destroyed thoroughly. That information was later used against Winston.
What is legally considered entrapment these days?
Entrapment requires compelling someone to do something that they would not have done without the investigation compelling them to do it. Distasteful as it is for FBI agents to provide fake bombs and blank ammunition to those that are disgruntled so that they attempt to attack and fail and can be busted for stronger charges, the individuals that chose to take the materials and carry out the attack did so of their own free will, and thus is not entrapment.
It starts becoming unclear when the attacker is given planning assistance by the agents, as it calls into question if they'd even be capable of doing such an act without more help than supply assistance. If the investigators put them into the position where they must carry out the attack or there will be real consequences then that definitely is entrapment.
Its about having big balls -- the bold reap rewards.
We've got a lot of big talkers around here. This guy actually walked the walk instead of just pretending to be bold from the safety of his mom's basement. The band admired the guy's chutzpah and rewarded him for it. That's the lesson here.
Heh. I got myself off of a particular telemarketing firm's call list a while back; they were actually a local company pushing "the go green campaign" and I was able to glean enough information out of the caller to figure out the name of the real company. I used that information to find the name of the owner on Linked In and I then used his name to find his contact information, based on some stuff he'd handed out at a trade show or something. I called him at dinner time on his personal phone and we had a little chat about his company calling despite my repeated insistence that they stop; never heard from them after that ever again.
Someone further removed wouldn't have had any chance to be let in. Granted, on the face of it this didn't work either (any security guard better not let someone in that's not on the approved list) but someone further removed than direct household member wouldn't be granted access as a matter of course.
I'm starting to think that the popular 1988 song from Living Colour is more a documentary set to music than a satire unfortunately...
The reality distortion field generator is on the fritz. The yearly upgrade cycle business model is failing.
It's been about four years since Steve Jobs died. I'm still not exactly sure how, but that man was very, very good at reading what the public wanted even before the public knew what it wanted, and to then act as a filter within the company to provide products that fit those wants. Apple without Steve Jobs struggled before when he was released from the company when they attempted to go low-cost and mass-market, and Apple without Steve Jobs now appears to be making design missteps that no longer lead what the public wants to the degree that it once did.
I don't think that Apple will continue to stay in the position in the market that it once enjoyed. It will probably still have successful products, it will probably continue to remain profitable, but I expect that Apple will have more duds on average than it used to have. Hell, eventually it might even slip to being just another tech company albeit with its own software instead of with someone else's. We'll just have to see.
You get way better intelligence by allowing use of these resources. Additionally any attempt to disrupt use will inevitably prevent some legitimate use.
This argument only works for foes like the Germans with their Enigma and Lorenz machines during World War II, where the size of the foe's organization means that the foe is able to adapt when their existing technologies are disrupted. State-level military operations that are essentially at parity with one's own operations cannot be completely shut down or permanently disrupted so easily.
For non-state entities like terror organizations, disrupting their command and control and other communications might actually break real operations, and might even help serve to change the nature of those that would sympathize with them. Remember, there have been cases where law enforcement, not criminal entities, managed to contact and provide means and encouragement to disgruntled individuals that motivated them to act. It's not legally entrapment, but without communication, encouragement, and means, would these people have attempted to commit acts?
One has to wonder about the effectiveness of all of the monitoring that we've all been so perturbed by. We've had attacks in Paris and in San Bernadino where unencrypted communications were used and the attacks were not disrupted. This foe, while not insignificant, is small enough that using their communications to disrupt their acts should be very effective, but it's not proving effective. If it's not effective, then what's the whole damn point? This isn't World War II where the stakes for the enemy learning of the interception would mean that interception would end.
"Earth Sugardrink" when talking about whatever the most popular human soda is.
I'm adopting this expression. Hell, we should all adopt this expression, so maybe we'll drink less of it and actually enjoy it more when we do have it...
This is even better than prison. At least i think so. In prison, they can hide their shame from the world at large. Now, half the man (or less) and subjected to publicity they walk among the people they once abused. What better way for the fickle hands of fate to deal the next hand?
I've known people like the subject of the article. You're not thinking like they and their peers think. They do not feel shame for their actions nor do they feel shame for being subjected to punishment for them. They feel their actions are legitimate and they feel anger directed toward those that have thwarted them, and actions like the court has taken only stiffen their resolve.
People like this need to be put into jail if they're to actually learn. People like this that continue to have their freedom are still free to pursue more of these kinds of schemes because they've seen how little the consequences, really, are for them. Left like this, with some means, they're going to simply repeat the pattern that we've already seen.
Embarrassment on the streets? Walking among those they abused? Do you feel like everyone is watching you on the streets? Do you feel like the entire community knows who you are or even cares? Hell, criminals that have inflicted violence on others and been convicted semi-anonymously walk the streets and no one really knows what they've done or how that could mean that they are riskier than others; copyright trolls are less of a danger and far less directly impacting on the local community and will easily avoid any sort of public shame during the course of their days.
This is a victory, but it's hollow one and only one more battle, not the end of the war.
You'd be better off removing the polarized film from an LCD panel and installing that film on a pair of glasses. You'd have a monitor that only you could see.
I donno, I have an awful lot of fun in my '95 Impala, and it's bigger than and just as heavy as anything else on the road today short of a full-sized truck.
Killing an innocent person...