William Hague told us that the innocent have nothing to fear and that they're only collecting meta data etc. Successors to him have repeated that they work within a robust legal framework, must be necessary and proportionate, yadda yadda yadda.
Surely, with all these protections and assurances they can't be worried can they?
The thing that annoys me more than any of this story alone is that none of the Home Secretaries that spouted this utter bullshit will face any sort of recrimination. Tossers the lot of 'em*.
* Any MP that wants to convince me that they're not a tosser is welcome to explain themselves. I even invited my MP to demonstrate he wasn't a tosser, and all he could manage was a letter back to say he "worked very hard", thus re-inforcing my view of him.
Another source? Is this person(s) also in hiding in (of all places, Russia), or locked in a cell on their own for months at a time? I'd even settle for someone hiding out in a foreign embassy.
As a brainwashed media consumer, I can't think of a leak being even vaguely true unless the whistleblower is being actively hounded by the US authorities.
I seriously doubt anyone would ever be able to sell an "autonomous" car that might, at literally any moment, at any speed, in any conditions hand control back to the human, for exactly the reasons you state. Who would want to buy such a thing?
A more likely outcome is that when something that can't be handed occurs, the car comes to a controlled stop (maybe quickly?), and then hands over control. FOr example, if the road is significantly different than expected (maybe a fallen tree, or subsidence or something). Or, perhaps just it meanders up to the farm track that's overgrown with weeds and says "the GPS says to go this way, but I can't figure it out - over to you buddy".
Of course, once the technology matures, then the frequency of human interventions will be so small that cars will be made without any human controls in them. The worst thing those cars will do is say "sorry, I can't get you to your destination - wanna go back home?".
I'm inclined to agree until coke/beer/doughnut/pie abusers get diabetes (or in fact any other weight/health related issue). Then on it does become my problem because I pay taxes which go in part to fund our national health service. Thus, if people could avoid abusing foods, they'd avoid the health issues and would thus avoid overburdening the NHS and thus save me some tax.
Assuming you're an american, you're probably thinking this doesn't apply to you - but it does. There are no poor and impoverished health insurance companies. They only get rich by extracting money from their customers and by not paying it out when those customers claim. The more people have completely avoidable health problems, the more money they need to extract from their customers.
That said, I too enjoy the odd (diet/zero) coke. You know it's gotta be bad for you when it cures a hangover;-)
I have a Thinkpad X121e (pick them up on ebay pretty cheaply these days) - it's run various Fedoras over the years very successfully. I've used the Windows pre-install a diminishingly small number of times, but have had more fundamental problems with it than with Linux (recently I had Windows 7 just refuse to boot at all - it said "fixing" for about 20 minutes and just gave up with no further options to proceed). These days windows is in a VM and so it's 100% linux - its been kicked about a fair bit over the years too - so far, touch-wood, so good though.
And they didn't lose a single life in the process? No property was damaged? No 'consumables' (like weapons, chemicals, food etc) were used? Really?
Oh right - they did lose lives and property. So they lost, arguably less than the British though. We're back to the OP's point - war: everyone loses, it's just a question of how much.
I seriously doubt the French will get anywhere with this.
However, hypothetically, if they did, then another option for Google would be to spin their European business off as a separate entity. Let's call that Foogle...
Foogle would 'buy' search data from Google, at huge cost. It would then employ people/machines to strip out the results that are supposed to be 'forgotten'. It would then run servers (as Google already does) here in Europe to serve those results up. Foogle would also 'rent' the domains like google.fr and have them redirect to foogle.fr, from whence they provide search results. Foogle acts as a third party agent to Google, so advertisers can go to them instead of Google for the services they want. Foogle either delivers those services locally via its own servers, or backs off the work to Google to get it done internationally. From a legal standpoint, Google now has no assets or people in Europe - it uses 'resellers' to do everything it needs. The French can go after Foogle all they like, and Foogle can (correctly) argue that it has removed links from all of its international services. The fact that a competing search engine (Google) has done something different is neither here nor there.
The fact is, if a numptie like me can figure a way around this law, you can bet your lunch Google will. As much as we like to think politicians are idiots, they're rarely this stupid. There's some other play going on here which we're not immediately privy to. It may be a simple as 'job justification', or they're manoeuvring for some other proposal that does what they actually want.
I've heard about this, but can't see any evidence of it myself. I just visited Ghostery's home page with Firebug switched on and the only domains it downloaded any content from are ghostery.com and fonts.googleapis.com.
I noticed a while back that after an update some of the 'trackers' weren't selected in the Options screens. I always just say "select all" on the trackers and cookies tabs, but I guess if you're not completely watching then things could slip by.
Apart from laziness, I suspect the EFF's tool is probably a better choice these days:-(
What I get from this article is that he's saying that some proportion of one's R&D output should be on internal tools or process improvements. He claims 30%, I'd say 10% is probably plenty, but he's far more senior and richer than me, so maybe he's right.
From my sysadmin (now known as devops engineer) position, I can see some really shoddy tools, systems and processes that applications have to use. A few years back I built a system to alleviate a whole load of productivity problems and solve a raft of technical problems as well. It's only just getting traction from the dev side of the house because it's literally taken this long for any of the devs to have enough latitude to engineer it into their builds. The thing is, as with so many things like this, it's hard to put a solid "price" on any of this, so it's hard to factor it into the normal dev cycle (which is a management failing, IMHO).
Herein lies the failings of many a technical organisation - developing features is not enough. Spending some proportion of your time fixing up legacy, decom'ing old crap, or building new tools isn't actually going to slow you down - in truth it probably won't speed you up either, but it means you can raise the base level of technology in your organisation and so can build better systems, applications and features in the future. For people like a number of my employers, and indeed Twitter, this means you get to create barriers to entry and can outperform your existing competition.
I see this 'continuous improvement' thing as *engineering* - it's part of what I learned about the craft of engineering at college and uni, yet it's something that's completely lacking in many so-called "engineering" organisations. Nice to see someone with some credentials talking about it - maybe one or two outfits will be listening.
Whilst I agree with what you're saying, it's possible another species may have a life span of say 1000 earth years. For them, getting to Earth from Zod might be like a year to us (relatively speaking). Thus, they may not need to hibernate or whatever on the journey. They do need the advanced living capabilities though.
Early Human exploration voyages around the world took many months in many cases. Explorers would drop pigs off on islands so that they had a chance to survive if they ended up getting marooned there later on. It's possible Earth may look like an island on the way to something useful to another civilisation, and they may drop off something more disruptive than even the pigs were to their local environments.
All that said, anyone capable of coming here is either so incredibly superior to us that no matter what we do we're screwed (if they decide to disrupt us), or else they're so superior to us that they pose no threat whatsoever. Either way, it's not worth worrying about - at least not for some considerable time until we're ready to go elsewhere ourselves...
I know the wrench argument, but it distorts the reality as much as the sorts of people who might use one do.
You can use all the technical means you like to keep your stuff secure/private. So long as all you ever do is legally and morally 'safe' then you'll have public sympathy if they ever hear about someone using a wrench on you (thus, those who might use such a wrench are less likely to do so). If they do eventually choose to do so, they'll have to ensure that the public doesn't hear about it, or that the public can be 'managed' sufficiently so that they don't side with you and not them. That puts up the cost of the $5 wrench into the tens of thousands of dollars/pounds/groats sort of territory. That's a whole different proposition than reading your plaintext because you thought "oh well, never mind".
Hmm.. lets see now... how about some community service?
At least this way the state gets something out of the deal, supposedly to compensate us for the terrible wrongs we've suffered here. Right now, you and I are just paying for his jail time, and nothing of value is ever created or returned to us.
From a business point of view, using the cloud means you get to put your monthly costs into your "op-ex" as opposed to buying a load of stuff up front (with cash) and writing it off over a couple of years on your "cap-ex". That can help your accounts look good because you get to maintain cash flow (particularly in the early days) and don't have lots of assets on the books. Not one single accountant that looks at your accounts will know if you're getting a good deal from your cloud or not, so it's works very well at impressing those sorts of people. Those sorts of people are quite probably your backers and bankers, who are increasingly risk adverse. They don't want to give you loads of cash today which all gets spent immediately (on the promise of success) and so would much rather drip-feed out their investment in you over a couple of years as they see success actually happening.
Going to the cloud means you don't need start-up capital to get started. In that sense it's very good and a great enabler of small business. However, as you say, once you've started up, you're better off taking the initial hit (from your cash reserve) to buy it all and run it in house. If you've got any sort of reputation to maintain, then moving stuff in-house is pretty much your duty of care (well, it is as soon as you lose your data and your customers complain about it). The question is... when are you no longer a "small business" that can be forgiven minor transgressions and "big enough" that you should know better? It seems to me that lots of really big corps. are trying to pretend they're "small" (ie. lean start-ups) when they absolutely should know better. We'll probably have to ride this out until the next 'fad' comes along.
I'm looking forward to some crap-spreading malware that uses the telemetry feature to send a load of fake telemetry to Microsoft. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the review meetings:
Techie: "Telemetry data shows that 72% of our users spend over 3 hours a day using the calculator" Boss: Let's make a full screen calculator that's full of ads so we can capitalise on selling as much of those pixels as we can. Ad exec: I'll put together some messaging for our client base that are in the market segments that are a good fit with your findings
The following month:
Techie: Telemetry shows that almost universally no one is using the calculator any longer. They've all moved to Notepad now Boss: Okay, pull any remaining dev work on the calculator and move them all onto the Notepad team. This time let's do really subtle advertising that won't scare the users away like we did with the calculator Ad exec: [something unintelligible to anyone with an IQ over 75]
...or throw an empty supemarket plastic bag into the wind. Humans will identify and pretty much ignore it, but the automated systems will see a large object 'flying' in the path of the vehicle and will slow/stop/avoid.
All this tech is really cool - I mean really cool, but it's still got a long way to go before it's absolutely better than a human in all cases.
It's very informative that they thought to put Checkpoints trading symbol in the advert^H^H^H^H^H article though, now I know where to invest my money - that's the kind of information I come to slashdot to find.
...or at least maybe throw some money into Wayne Research to come up with some of the toys Batman gets to use. It's easier to work from home that way, and less problematic if you're a feeble IT geek who's bad with heights;-)
Exactly. Using one's dominance in one market to gain advantage in another = antitrust. If they just bid on adwords like everyone else gets to then they'd be fine, but doing something special not available to anyone else is a problem (at least here in Europe - where I suspect they're not doing this).
Most EAs I've ever known are technical in so much as they are interested in technology, but not deep-techie enough to know how to properly administer a Linux machine, or even to install Tomcat or whatever. They understand the concepts, but not the implementation. They also seem to end up doing a lot of documentation and going to a lot of meetings (which are often technical meetings, not all just business fluff).
Since you asked for advice, mine is:
- an EA position is far, far more administrative than an ops role (documentation, diagrams, presentations). It's also interfacing with the business, so requires some ability to work those relationships and pitch to non-technical people. Ultimately, you'll need lots of business people on-side to 'sponsor' anything you ever want to do. A lot of job specs call for "evangelists" - you're going to be the guy at the top of that pyramid scheme;-) - If you're looking to keep getting your hands dirty doing console hacking and such like, then an EA position is not for you. You're unlikely to even be able to throw together a PoC yourself, much less actually work on real stuff - If you're looking to be responsible for elegant, manageable systems that all behave themselves well and provide the business benefits that are demanded of them, then you're aspiring to be an EA - Don't think about what the current guy's job looks like - if you want to go for it, take the job and make it into the job you want
These numbers are basically bollocks. I'd be prepared to bet that 80% of any businesses, large, small or from the planet Zod have had a malware infection within the last 2 years. The point is that they're asking if they've had *any* problem - it could be that someone clicked a link, they realised their mistake and called IT to rebuild their machine, right up to confidential data transmission to parties unknown.
If they'd asked "have you lost any confidential patient data in the last 2 years?", I bet the number admitting to it would be virtually zero. For those that have lost data and know about it, they've either been out in public already, or else are doing everything they can to cover it up as it could be commercial suicide to admit such a thing. I'll bet the majority of companies of any sort couldn't be sure data had been lost unless it was a massive loss or performed by some idiot employee who got caught loading his desktop into the back of his car. Admitting you caught a virus here or there is pretty much a zero-risk thing to admit, because in most cases it causes no direct harm other than some extra work for some IT folks.
For all its worth, we could ask "has your home network been port scanned in the last year?". 80% of slashdotters would say yes, the other 20% would say no because they haven't checked, and yet nothing of value was gained or lost as a result. For extra click bait, I could then add "port scanning is the first step to far more serious hacks which could result in data loss" (which would mimic all the scaremongering in the article, all of which is attributed to KPMG).
Slashdot Mirror
William Hague told us that the innocent have nothing to fear and that they're only collecting meta data etc. Successors to him have repeated that they work within a robust legal framework, must be necessary and proportionate, yadda yadda yadda.
Surely, with all these protections and assurances they can't be worried can they?
The thing that annoys me more than any of this story alone is that none of the Home Secretaries that spouted this utter bullshit will face any sort of recrimination. Tossers the lot of 'em*.
* Any MP that wants to convince me that they're not a tosser is welcome to explain themselves. I even invited my MP to demonstrate he wasn't a tosser, and all he could manage was a letter back to say he "worked very hard", thus re-inforcing my view of him.
Another source? Is this person(s) also in hiding in (of all places, Russia), or locked in a cell on their own for months at a time? I'd even settle for someone hiding out in a foreign embassy.
As a brainwashed media consumer, I can't think of a leak being even vaguely true unless the whistleblower is being actively hounded by the US authorities.
I seriously doubt anyone would ever be able to sell an "autonomous" car that might, at literally any moment, at any speed, in any conditions hand control back to the human, for exactly the reasons you state. Who would want to buy such a thing?
A more likely outcome is that when something that can't be handed occurs, the car comes to a controlled stop (maybe quickly?), and then hands over control. FOr example, if the road is significantly different than expected (maybe a fallen tree, or subsidence or something). Or, perhaps just it meanders up to the farm track that's overgrown with weeds and says "the GPS says to go this way, but I can't figure it out - over to you buddy".
Of course, once the technology matures, then the frequency of human interventions will be so small that cars will be made without any human controls in them. The worst thing those cars will do is say "sorry, I can't get you to your destination - wanna go back home?".
I'm inclined to agree until coke/beer/doughnut/pie abusers get diabetes (or in fact any other weight/health related issue). Then on it does become my problem because I pay taxes which go in part to fund our national health service. Thus, if people could avoid abusing foods, they'd avoid the health issues and would thus avoid overburdening the NHS and thus save me some tax.
Assuming you're an american, you're probably thinking this doesn't apply to you - but it does. There are no poor and impoverished health insurance companies. They only get rich by extracting money from their customers and by not paying it out when those customers claim. The more people have completely avoidable health problems, the more money they need to extract from their customers.
That said, I too enjoy the odd (diet/zero) coke. You know it's gotta be bad for you when it cures a hangover ;-)
I have a Thinkpad X121e (pick them up on ebay pretty cheaply these days) - it's run various Fedoras over the years very successfully. I've used the Windows pre-install a diminishingly small number of times, but have had more fundamental problems with it than with Linux (recently I had Windows 7 just refuse to boot at all - it said "fixing" for about 20 minutes and just gave up with no further options to proceed). These days windows is in a VM and so it's 100% linux - its been kicked about a fair bit over the years too - so far, touch-wood, so good though.
And they didn't lose a single life in the process? No property was damaged? No 'consumables' (like weapons, chemicals, food etc) were used? Really?
Oh right - they did lose lives and property. So they lost, arguably less than the British though. We're back to the OP's point - war: everyone loses, it's just a question of how much.
I seriously doubt the French will get anywhere with this.
However, hypothetically, if they did, then another option for Google would be to spin their European business off as a separate entity. Let's call that Foogle...
Foogle would 'buy' search data from Google, at huge cost. It would then employ people/machines to strip out the results that are supposed to be 'forgotten'. It would then run servers (as Google already does) here in Europe to serve those results up. Foogle would also 'rent' the domains like google.fr and have them redirect to foogle.fr, from whence they provide search results. Foogle acts as a third party agent to Google, so advertisers can go to them instead of Google for the services they want. Foogle either delivers those services locally via its own servers, or backs off the work to Google to get it done internationally. From a legal standpoint, Google now has no assets or people in Europe - it uses 'resellers' to do everything it needs. The French can go after Foogle all they like, and Foogle can (correctly) argue that it has removed links from all of its international services. The fact that a competing search engine (Google) has done something different is neither here nor there.
The fact is, if a numptie like me can figure a way around this law, you can bet your lunch Google will. As much as we like to think politicians are idiots, they're rarely this stupid. There's some other play going on here which we're not immediately privy to. It may be a simple as 'job justification', or they're manoeuvring for some other proposal that does what they actually want.
A bit sugar laden, but tasty though :-)
I've heard about this, but can't see any evidence of it myself. I just visited Ghostery's home page with Firebug switched on and the only domains it downloaded any content from are ghostery.com and fonts.googleapis.com.
I noticed a while back that after an update some of the 'trackers' weren't selected in the Options screens. I always just say "select all" on the trackers and cookies tabs, but I guess if you're not completely watching then things could slip by.
Apart from laziness, I suspect the EFF's tool is probably a better choice these days :-(
Another oldish man ranting...
What I get from this article is that he's saying that some proportion of one's R&D output should be on internal tools or process improvements. He claims 30%, I'd say 10% is probably plenty, but he's far more senior and richer than me, so maybe he's right.
From my sysadmin (now known as devops engineer) position, I can see some really shoddy tools, systems and processes that applications have to use. A few years back I built a system to alleviate a whole load of productivity problems and solve a raft of technical problems as well. It's only just getting traction from the dev side of the house because it's literally taken this long for any of the devs to have enough latitude to engineer it into their builds. The thing is, as with so many things like this, it's hard to put a solid "price" on any of this, so it's hard to factor it into the normal dev cycle (which is a management failing, IMHO).
Herein lies the failings of many a technical organisation - developing features is not enough. Spending some proportion of your time fixing up legacy, decom'ing old crap, or building new tools isn't actually going to slow you down - in truth it probably won't speed you up either, but it means you can raise the base level of technology in your organisation and so can build better systems, applications and features in the future. For people like a number of my employers, and indeed Twitter, this means you get to create barriers to entry and can outperform your existing competition.
I see this 'continuous improvement' thing as *engineering* - it's part of what I learned about the craft of engineering at college and uni, yet it's something that's completely lacking in many so-called "engineering" organisations. Nice to see someone with some credentials talking about it - maybe one or two outfits will be listening.
Yeah, I believe it. In fact, as a Top Security Consultant myself*, I'll give you a quote:
"$country Compiling "Facebook" of $other_country Government Employees"
Where $country may possibly even be equal to $other_country, and both can be picked from this list: http://www.listofcountriesofth...
* that statement is probably no more true than any of CrowdStrike's credentials, but I've got products and services for sale ;-)
If things 180 day old were no use, we'd have no slashdot at all ;-)
Whilst I agree with what you're saying, it's possible another species may have a life span of say 1000 earth years. For them, getting to Earth from Zod might be like a year to us (relatively speaking). Thus, they may not need to hibernate or whatever on the journey. They do need the advanced living capabilities though.
Early Human exploration voyages around the world took many months in many cases. Explorers would drop pigs off on islands so that they had a chance to survive if they ended up getting marooned there later on. It's possible Earth may look like an island on the way to something useful to another civilisation, and they may drop off something more disruptive than even the pigs were to their local environments.
All that said, anyone capable of coming here is either so incredibly superior to us that no matter what we do we're screwed (if they decide to disrupt us), or else they're so superior to us that they pose no threat whatsoever. Either way, it's not worth worrying about - at least not for some considerable time until we're ready to go elsewhere ourselves...
I know the wrench argument, but it distorts the reality as much as the sorts of people who might use one do.
You can use all the technical means you like to keep your stuff secure/private. So long as all you ever do is legally and morally 'safe' then you'll have public sympathy if they ever hear about someone using a wrench on you (thus, those who might use such a wrench are less likely to do so). If they do eventually choose to do so, they'll have to ensure that the public doesn't hear about it, or that the public can be 'managed' sufficiently so that they don't side with you and not them. That puts up the cost of the $5 wrench into the tens of thousands of dollars/pounds/groats sort of territory. That's a whole different proposition than reading your plaintext because you thought "oh well, never mind".
so not 'strong' then...?
Hmm.. lets see now... how about some community service?
At least this way the state gets something out of the deal, supposedly to compensate us for the terrible wrongs we've suffered here. Right now, you and I are just paying for his jail time, and nothing of value is ever created or returned to us.
From a business point of view, using the cloud means you get to put your monthly costs into your "op-ex" as opposed to buying a load of stuff up front (with cash) and writing it off over a couple of years on your "cap-ex". That can help your accounts look good because you get to maintain cash flow (particularly in the early days) and don't have lots of assets on the books. Not one single accountant that looks at your accounts will know if you're getting a good deal from your cloud or not, so it's works very well at impressing those sorts of people. Those sorts of people are quite probably your backers and bankers, who are increasingly risk adverse. They don't want to give you loads of cash today which all gets spent immediately (on the promise of success) and so would much rather drip-feed out their investment in you over a couple of years as they see success actually happening.
Going to the cloud means you don't need start-up capital to get started. In that sense it's very good and a great enabler of small business. However, as you say, once you've started up, you're better off taking the initial hit (from your cash reserve) to buy it all and run it in house. If you've got any sort of reputation to maintain, then moving stuff in-house is pretty much your duty of care (well, it is as soon as you lose your data and your customers complain about it). The question is... when are you no longer a "small business" that can be forgiven minor transgressions and "big enough" that you should know better? It seems to me that lots of really big corps. are trying to pretend they're "small" (ie. lean start-ups) when they absolutely should know better. We'll probably have to ride this out until the next 'fad' comes along.
I'm looking forward to some crap-spreading malware that uses the telemetry feature to send a load of fake telemetry to Microsoft. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the review meetings:
Techie: "Telemetry data shows that 72% of our users spend over 3 hours a day using the calculator"
Boss: Let's make a full screen calculator that's full of ads so we can capitalise on selling as much of those pixels as we can.
Ad exec: I'll put together some messaging for our client base that are in the market segments that are a good fit with your findings
The following month:
Techie: Telemetry shows that almost universally no one is using the calculator any longer. They've all moved to Notepad now
Boss: Okay, pull any remaining dev work on the calculator and move them all onto the Notepad team. This time let's do really subtle advertising that won't scare the users away like we did with the calculator
Ad exec: [something unintelligible to anyone with an IQ over 75]
It's a meta-story. On the face of it, it's about AltaVista and Google, but in reality it's about the speed that articles of the day get onto slashdot.
This one measures about 10 years - up on last year, but still down on the overall trend ;-)
...or throw an empty supemarket plastic bag into the wind. Humans will identify and pretty much ignore it, but the automated systems will see a large object 'flying' in the path of the vehicle and will slow/stop/avoid.
All this tech is really cool - I mean really cool, but it's still got a long way to go before it's absolutely better than a human in all cases.
It's very informative that they thought to put Checkpoints trading symbol in the advert^H^H^H^H^H article though, now I know where to invest my money - that's the kind of information I come to slashdot to find.
...or at least maybe throw some money into Wayne Research to come up with some of the toys Batman gets to use. It's easier to work from home that way, and less problematic if you're a feeble IT geek who's bad with heights ;-)
Exactly. Using one's dominance in one market to gain advantage in another = antitrust. If they just bid on adwords like everyone else gets to then they'd be fine, but doing something special not available to anyone else is a problem (at least here in Europe - where I suspect they're not doing this).
Most EAs I've ever known are technical in so much as they are interested in technology, but not deep-techie enough to know how to properly administer a Linux machine, or even to install Tomcat or whatever. They understand the concepts, but not the implementation. They also seem to end up doing a lot of documentation and going to a lot of meetings (which are often technical meetings, not all just business fluff).
Since you asked for advice, mine is:
- an EA position is far, far more administrative than an ops role (documentation, diagrams, presentations). It's also interfacing with the business, so requires some ability to work those relationships and pitch to non-technical people. Ultimately, you'll need lots of business people on-side to 'sponsor' anything you ever want to do. A lot of job specs call for "evangelists" - you're going to be the guy at the top of that pyramid scheme ;-)
- If you're looking to keep getting your hands dirty doing console hacking and such like, then an EA position is not for you. You're unlikely to even be able to throw together a PoC yourself, much less actually work on real stuff
- If you're looking to be responsible for elegant, manageable systems that all behave themselves well and provide the business benefits that are demanded of them, then you're aspiring to be an EA
- Don't think about what the current guy's job looks like - if you want to go for it, take the job and make it into the job you want
These numbers are basically bollocks. I'd be prepared to bet that 80% of any businesses, large, small or from the planet Zod have had a malware infection within the last 2 years. The point is that they're asking if they've had *any* problem - it could be that someone clicked a link, they realised their mistake and called IT to rebuild their machine, right up to confidential data transmission to parties unknown.
If they'd asked "have you lost any confidential patient data in the last 2 years?", I bet the number admitting to it would be virtually zero. For those that have lost data and know about it, they've either been out in public already, or else are doing everything they can to cover it up as it could be commercial suicide to admit such a thing. I'll bet the majority of companies of any sort couldn't be sure data had been lost unless it was a massive loss or performed by some idiot employee who got caught loading his desktop into the back of his car. Admitting you caught a virus here or there is pretty much a zero-risk thing to admit, because in most cases it causes no direct harm other than some extra work for some IT folks.
For all its worth, we could ask "has your home network been port scanned in the last year?". 80% of slashdotters would say yes, the other 20% would say no because they haven't checked, and yet nothing of value was gained or lost as a result. For extra click bait, I could then add "port scanning is the first step to far more serious hacks which could result in data loss" (which would mimic all the scaremongering in the article, all of which is attributed to KPMG).