I'm not sure of the details of the Javascript in question, but assuming it doesn't 'phone home' to some third party server, then it could be comfortably hosted on the same CDN as the host website. That would have mitigated this problem almost entirely. This is something akin to making copies of images you got from third parties rather than using them directly in your <img%gt; tags - if you don't host it yourself, you're at the whim of the third party.
I do find it slightly heartening that the UK ICO (https://ico.org.uk/) was affected - if they come a-knocking after GDPR kicks in at the end of May, then the first line of defence for a lot of people will probably be "yeah, but you guys slipped up too!?";-)
Could he spin it out to kids to 'launch' something they've made? Even if it's just going up to come crashing/burning back down again, I'd probably have loved to have sent one of my toys, or a bit of electronics up in a rocket.
I agree, no one's going to put a multi-million bitcoin satellite or something on there, but it could be filled with stuff we know we're going to lose. Hell, he could fill it up with plastic dredged from the ocean;-)
Actually, there's some reason to think that even if you replaced every vehicle on the road today with a self-driving one that you would actually have less congestion. I doubt it would be 'problem solved', but you could expect less time sat stationary than you do now.
One example is things like the school drop off - I do it, and I have to leave my car parked somewhere for about 15 minutes while I walk the kids over the road to the school. If my car was self-driving, it could just drop us off, and keep moving - making that parking space free for traffic to actually drive on (so greater road capacity).
On motorways and other busy roads, we could expect less queues because if one developed, everyone coming up to it (potentially several miles away) would slow down to reduce the 'input load' to the congested area. People who have alternative routes could take them, knowing what the additional wait time would be to use the congested route.
Now, back to the article... I'd quite like to have no car - but please god, don't let the only haling service in town be uber. If it is, I'll just buy a car, thanks;-)
Atrocious customer service? Paypal is great until it isn't - and when it isn't, it's an absolute abomination - it's far, far too hard to do things like remove an old card from your account, or unlock a card after they've decided it's 'locked' or any number of other things. I've never used them to collect money for me, but I'm told it's a risky business with them randomly freezing accounts and whatnot with little option to appeal or even work with them to solve the issue at hand.
As for 'trusting the merchant', you almost never do - only the big merchants work this way, everyone else sends you off to WorldPay or some such to take the money.
Yep, I'd add these, although they're not quite so international:
- Dyson (make vacuum cleaners and other products, and reportedly getting into self-driving cars) - Farnell (well, they sell tech, and IMHO generally better than RS) - Andrews and Arnold (ISP), mostly because they refuse to censor their service (https://www.aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-realinternet.html)
I should probably also add/. (and not their parent) - whatever it is or isn't, I/we seem to keep coming back to it;-)
I thought it sounded like the Freenet Project, which I last saw about 10 years ago (is it still going?). It offered an anonymised browsing experience, and the ability to upload content to the network (which would be split up, encrypted and stored on multiple servers). Clients would find all the fragments and assemble them. It actually worked reasonably well, although had lots of issues (but I seem to remember using version like 0.1.5 or some such, so I'll cut them some slack!).
If you're waiting for the US Government to do something about this, you'll be waiting almost as long as you will for the tracking companies to do something themselves through some sort of 'voluntary code of practice'.
For anything worth doing, you need a government not owned by the businesses at risk here. The Europeans look to be making quite some inroads into this sort of thing with GDPR and the like. They don't outlaw tracking by any means, but at least raise the cost of doing business a bit. That won't stop the big companies of course, but it's a start.
In the meantime, adblock, noscript, ghostery, privacy badger etc are really your only defence - if they don't get it in the first place, then they can't misuse it. I predict there'll be some actual tracking limiting laws coming out of Europe in about 5 years time - it still won't stop tracking or profiling entirely, but it'll put further dents in those activities as a business model, and give the advertisers a less certain destination for their ads (which in turn will devalue the tracking/profiling activity somewhat).
But they (repeatedly) tell me that "a lot has been happening on Facebook since you last visited..." and then proceed to tell me I've got "2 pokes". I'm sure someone at Facebook Towers falls off their chair regularly when they learn that their genius email marketing isn't actually working on me.
Dear Facebook: If you want me back, do something interesting. Until then, I'm doing much better without you, thanks.
By the sounds of things, campaigning for government funded health care in the US, right now, with the orange one in office is about as effective as trying to suck up a tornado with a vacuum cleaner. Hats off to him/them though - they're good at running companies, so they're gonna run one to completely show up how terrible the government has been on this subject.
I'm not entirely sure I'd be happy receiving a treatment marked "Amazon Basics" or "Amazon's choice" though;-)
I've only had one private healthcare experience in the US (on a ski hill). It was okay, nothing crazy awesome, but perfectly good for what I needed from it (I did have a chuckle when a nurse said "I'll just go get some ice" and headed off towards some fridges... and went right past them, opened the door and took a scoop of snow from the ground outside).
One touch they did which I wish we got here in the UK was I was sent away with a piece of paper with a summary of what had happened on it. It's a great way to remember all the crazy language the docs talk when they tell you what they're doing.
All that said, I've never had anything other that doing-our-absolute-best-with-what-we've-got from the NHS. It's obvious they're cash-strapped, but the people in it are still doing an amazing job.
I realised a while back that in the UK, if you have 2 kids, you pretty much *need* a big car (assuming you need a car, which you do unless you live in London). By law, kids have to be in a high-back child seat until the age of 27*, which means that they need quite a bit of space in the back to fit them and the seats in. Having two of them means there's about half a seat between, which means you can't transport any other adults around, and can't put a child in there because that would be illegal. Thus, if you have a need to transport the mother-in-law or someone else around from time to time, you're going to need a 7 seat car. Gone are the days of stashing a couple of kids (loose) in the boot and just driving slowly.
Granted, "they trucks" aren't terribly common in the UK unless you're a builder. A few of the 'cool dudes' have very shiny ones, but even they've realised that whilst you can put 'Me Julie' in the passenger seat, you can't transport her friend at the same time, which limits your lady-attracting capabilities. No such problem with the quintessential BMW 5-series (not exactly a small car, but not a truck).
* Okay, it's not really 27, but it's when they're 125cm or 22Kgs - which is probably about the age of 6-7.
...and actually, even the rich get f-ed by it too. The middle class mostly gets decimated by this - sure, maybe a bit slower and less harshly, but it loses out all the same. My cosy IT jobs aren't going to get easier to find, neither is all that Fund Management, management consultancy and whatnot either.
When we say "the rich" in this context, we really mean a small subset of them (shall we say "1% of the 1%"?). The rest of us need some other solution, which as far as I know, no one has really figured out yet.
Indeed, and so we're now seeing the UK Government being tested. If they conclude as you did, then all is well. However, if they continue to seek Assange, then it becomes considerably more likely that there is an ulterior motive.
We know the US would love to 'nab' him, which they can do the moment he's in UK Police custody - I'd bet he wouldn't spend more than an hour in a UK police cell before he was spirited away to the US. He wouldn't get anywhere near a trial in the UK, so whatever he has or hasn't done, or whatever punishment he may or may not have experienced would be completely moot.
I personally believe the US pressure on the UK is probably pretty immense. The UK doesn't have that many 'bargaining chips' in such conversations, so I doubt much is going to happen here. Even still, if the UK decided there was no public interest, I wouldn't be surprised if 'dark forces' would wait until he was somewhere quiet and 'make him' break the law in some way, whilst a conveniently placed police officer could arrest him for assault or some such so extradition became possible once again.
Particles have a bit of gravity, and put enough of them together and you've got something that can pull things around in space. If particles also have an amount of consciousness, then could it be that putting enough of them together gives a "consciousness" like we feel it to be?
I'd imagine there would have to be some other conditions involved too, because otherwise a lump of rock is conscious too. Then again, maybe it is, but is unable to express that consciousness because it's a rock. We can probably go around and around in circles all day because we don't really know what consciousness is.
I've gotta say, the BBC have done this for me/us. Cbeebies is great for kids from about 2 until about 8-9-10 or so. The iPlayer Kids app is also an excellent idea - basically, you can load that up on an tablet and let them loose on making their own choices, sharing with siblings and whatnot and know that 100% they won't see any adverts for shit toys you don't want to have to buy or even have to deal with explaining to your kids, and they also won't see anything other than fairly reasonable content with some semblance of education thrown in.
I realise we shouldn't leave kids unattended with a tablet or a TV (which we don't), but even the likes of YouTube, TinyPop, NicJR, and even Netflix etc can't get close to what the BBC offers (mostly because those sources are heavily Americanised, so have 'wrong' accents and words for stuff, or just have really low-quality content).
As for what you can do yourself, getting the content is of course the hard part. Playing content directly on a tablet, or via a Kodi media client on a TV or whatever is pretty easy (again, it means your kids can choose what they want to watch, within your 'walled garden'). Getting enough variety and keeping up with whatever-the-other-kids-at-school are watching is the hard part - and trying to integrate streaming services into one usable entity is just futile.
I understand what you're saying, but I guess there's a part of me that hopes the next space station will be like an extension of the old one. "oh, that's the old, original part of the house, with no artificial gravity and the worst toilets you've ever seen, but if you come through here you get to the new part which we added recently, we put in bi-fold doors, raised the ceiling height and put in this new kitchen".
I'd argue it'd make the problem worse (although as an ex-FBer, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about).
If the only 'reliable' news sources (as marked by FB) were actually paid for, then FB would probably avoid chosing the more expensive ones if they could. Thus, the only 'reliable' sources of news will be the cheap ones. "Cheap" and "reliable" aren't usually synonymous.
For example, let's say both the BBC and Fox News have coverage of (say) Trump's 30% tariff on solar panels. The BBC generally do a pretty good job of being as unbiased as possible (although sometimes don't go very deep into a story), whereas it's generally thought that Fox are rather biased and partisan (and some say unreliable, erroneous etc).
Now, one of my friends posts a link to the BBC and another to the Fox coverage of the same story. Of all the people that view those two posts, exactly 50% click on one but not the other, and so both get the same number of clicks. However, the BBC costs FB $0.01/click more than Fox, and that news is starting to go crazy-viral and it looks like it's spreading throughout FB rapidly. FB would (obviously) realise that if 50% of their users click the BBC link, it'll cost them hundreds of thousands more than if people clicked the Fox links. As such, the Fox one gets surfaced more than the BBC.
Now, if you're the owner of a crappy news outlet like Fox, then you're doing very well - even though you're cheaper than the BBC, you're making more money than them. You've also managed to get your skewed view of the world in front of more eyeballs, and maybe had a few secondary clicks and whatnot too (all at the expense of the BBC).
As the outside observer, does this sound like a good outcome? Is it better than what we have now?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure of the details of the Javascript in question, but assuming it doesn't 'phone home' to some third party server, then it could be comfortably hosted on the same CDN as the host website. That would have mitigated this problem almost entirely. This is something akin to making copies of images you got from third parties rather than using them directly in your <img%gt; tags - if you don't host it yourself, you're at the whim of the third party.
I do find it slightly heartening that the UK ICO (https://ico.org.uk/) was affected - if they come a-knocking after GDPR kicks in at the end of May, then the first line of defence for a lot of people will probably be "yeah, but you guys slipped up too!?" ;-)
Could he spin it out to kids to 'launch' something they've made? Even if it's just going up to come crashing/burning back down again, I'd probably have loved to have sent one of my toys, or a bit of electronics up in a rocket.
I agree, no one's going to put a multi-million bitcoin satellite or something on there, but it could be filled with stuff we know we're going to lose. Hell, he could fill it up with plastic dredged from the ocean ;-)
Actually, there's some reason to think that even if you replaced every vehicle on the road today with a self-driving one that you would actually have less congestion. I doubt it would be 'problem solved', but you could expect less time sat stationary than you do now.
One example is things like the school drop off - I do it, and I have to leave my car parked somewhere for about 15 minutes while I walk the kids over the road to the school. If my car was self-driving, it could just drop us off, and keep moving - making that parking space free for traffic to actually drive on (so greater road capacity).
On motorways and other busy roads, we could expect less queues because if one developed, everyone coming up to it (potentially several miles away) would slow down to reduce the 'input load' to the congested area. People who have alternative routes could take them, knowing what the additional wait time would be to use the congested route.
Now, back to the article... I'd quite like to have no car - but please god, don't let the only haling service in town be uber. If it is, I'll just buy a car, thanks ;-)
True, but Microsoft loves a TLA, so you could have:
Manager, S/FS, HAC, FLN, DFS, RTS
What could be simpler?
I prefer the invisible <irony> tag. Sarcasm is so last century ;-)
Atrocious customer service? Paypal is great until it isn't - and when it isn't, it's an absolute abomination - it's far, far too hard to do things like remove an old card from your account, or unlock a card after they've decided it's 'locked' or any number of other things. I've never used them to collect money for me, but I'm told it's a risky business with them randomly freezing accounts and whatnot with little option to appeal or even work with them to solve the issue at hand.
As for 'trusting the merchant', you almost never do - only the big merchants work this way, everyone else sends you off to WorldPay or some such to take the money.
Yep, I'd add these, although they're not quite so international:
- Dyson (make vacuum cleaners and other products, and reportedly getting into self-driving cars)
- Farnell (well, they sell tech, and IMHO generally better than RS)
- Andrews and Arnold (ISP), mostly because they refuse to censor their service (https://www.aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-realinternet.html)
I should probably also add /. (and not their parent) - whatever it is or isn't, I/we seem to keep coming back to it ;-)
I thought it sounded like the Freenet Project, which I last saw about 10 years ago (is it still going?). It offered an anonymised browsing experience, and the ability to upload content to the network (which would be split up, encrypted and stored on multiple servers). Clients would find all the fragments and assemble them. It actually worked reasonably well, although had lots of issues (but I seem to remember using version like 0.1.5 or some such, so I'll cut them some slack!).
If you're waiting for the US Government to do something about this, you'll be waiting almost as long as you will for the tracking companies to do something themselves through some sort of 'voluntary code of practice'.
For anything worth doing, you need a government not owned by the businesses at risk here. The Europeans look to be making quite some inroads into this sort of thing with GDPR and the like. They don't outlaw tracking by any means, but at least raise the cost of doing business a bit. That won't stop the big companies of course, but it's a start.
In the meantime, adblock, noscript, ghostery, privacy badger etc are really your only defence - if they don't get it in the first place, then they can't misuse it. I predict there'll be some actual tracking limiting laws coming out of Europe in about 5 years time - it still won't stop tracking or profiling entirely, but it'll put further dents in those activities as a business model, and give the advertisers a less certain destination for their ads (which in turn will devalue the tracking/profiling activity somewhat).
But they (repeatedly) tell me that "a lot has been happening on Facebook since you last visited..." and then proceed to tell me I've got "2 pokes". I'm sure someone at Facebook Towers falls off their chair regularly when they learn that their genius email marketing isn't actually working on me.
Dear Facebook: If you want me back, do something interesting. Until then, I'm doing much better without you, thanks.
Yeah, America is a country that believes in 'small government', the 'free market' and self-regulation. Weird, huh!?
By the sounds of things, campaigning for government funded health care in the US, right now, with the orange one in office is about as effective as trying to suck up a tornado with a vacuum cleaner. Hats off to him/them though - they're good at running companies, so they're gonna run one to completely show up how terrible the government has been on this subject.
I'm not entirely sure I'd be happy receiving a treatment marked "Amazon Basics" or "Amazon's choice" though ;-)
I've only had one private healthcare experience in the US (on a ski hill). It was okay, nothing crazy awesome, but perfectly good for what I needed from it (I did have a chuckle when a nurse said "I'll just go get some ice" and headed off towards some fridges... and went right past them, opened the door and took a scoop of snow from the ground outside).
One touch they did which I wish we got here in the UK was I was sent away with a piece of paper with a summary of what had happened on it. It's a great way to remember all the crazy language the docs talk when they tell you what they're doing.
All that said, I've never had anything other that doing-our-absolute-best-with-what-we've-got from the NHS. It's obvious they're cash-strapped, but the people in it are still doing an amazing job.
I realised a while back that in the UK, if you have 2 kids, you pretty much *need* a big car (assuming you need a car, which you do unless you live in London). By law, kids have to be in a high-back child seat until the age of 27*, which means that they need quite a bit of space in the back to fit them and the seats in. Having two of them means there's about half a seat between, which means you can't transport any other adults around, and can't put a child in there because that would be illegal. Thus, if you have a need to transport the mother-in-law or someone else around from time to time, you're going to need a 7 seat car. Gone are the days of stashing a couple of kids (loose) in the boot and just driving slowly.
Granted, "they trucks" aren't terribly common in the UK unless you're a builder. A few of the 'cool dudes' have very shiny ones, but even they've realised that whilst you can put 'Me Julie' in the passenger seat, you can't transport her friend at the same time, which limits your lady-attracting capabilities. No such problem with the quintessential BMW 5-series (not exactly a small car, but not a truck).
* Okay, it's not really 27, but it's when they're 125cm or 22Kgs - which is probably about the age of 6-7.
We have a plugin hybrid, and we charge it from the grid. We only buy 'green' electricity though (and even 10% of our gas is 'green').
Your smug EV friends (and you) just live in a place with a wonky electricity market. Elsewhere, it's not so.
...and actually, even the rich get f-ed by it too. The middle class mostly gets decimated by this - sure, maybe a bit slower and less harshly, but it loses out all the same. My cosy IT jobs aren't going to get easier to find, neither is all that Fund Management, management consultancy and whatnot either.
When we say "the rich" in this context, we really mean a small subset of them (shall we say "1% of the 1%"?). The rest of us need some other solution, which as far as I know, no one has really figured out yet.
And now the Remanians are trying to stop even that from happening ;-)
Indeed, and so we're now seeing the UK Government being tested. If they conclude as you did, then all is well. However, if they continue to seek Assange, then it becomes considerably more likely that there is an ulterior motive.
We know the US would love to 'nab' him, which they can do the moment he's in UK Police custody - I'd bet he wouldn't spend more than an hour in a UK police cell before he was spirited away to the US. He wouldn't get anywhere near a trial in the UK, so whatever he has or hasn't done, or whatever punishment he may or may not have experienced would be completely moot.
I personally believe the US pressure on the UK is probably pretty immense. The UK doesn't have that many 'bargaining chips' in such conversations, so I doubt much is going to happen here. Even still, if the UK decided there was no public interest, I wouldn't be surprised if 'dark forces' would wait until he was somewhere quiet and 'make him' break the law in some way, whilst a conveniently placed police officer could arrest him for assault or some such so extradition became possible once again.
How about...
Particles have a bit of gravity, and put enough of them together and you've got something that can pull things around in space. If particles also have an amount of consciousness, then could it be that putting enough of them together gives a "consciousness" like we feel it to be?
I'd imagine there would have to be some other conditions involved too, because otherwise a lump of rock is conscious too. Then again, maybe it is, but is unable to express that consciousness because it's a rock. We can probably go around and around in circles all day because we don't really know what consciousness is.
Funny you should mention... it turns out Bagram airbase looks like a gps cock: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech...
I've gotta say, the BBC have done this for me/us. Cbeebies is great for kids from about 2 until about 8-9-10 or so. The iPlayer Kids app is also an excellent idea - basically, you can load that up on an tablet and let them loose on making their own choices, sharing with siblings and whatnot and know that 100% they won't see any adverts for shit toys you don't want to have to buy or even have to deal with explaining to your kids, and they also won't see anything other than fairly reasonable content with some semblance of education thrown in.
I realise we shouldn't leave kids unattended with a tablet or a TV (which we don't), but even the likes of YouTube, TinyPop, NicJR, and even Netflix etc can't get close to what the BBC offers (mostly because those sources are heavily Americanised, so have 'wrong' accents and words for stuff, or just have really low-quality content).
As for what you can do yourself, getting the content is of course the hard part. Playing content directly on a tablet, or via a Kodi media client on a TV or whatever is pretty easy (again, it means your kids can choose what they want to watch, within your 'walled garden'). Getting enough variety and keeping up with whatever-the-other-kids-at-school are watching is the hard part - and trying to integrate streaming services into one usable entity is just futile.
First time I've seen that - I'd say BASIC was a lot less geeky.
I understand what you're saying, but I guess there's a part of me that hopes the next space station will be like an extension of the old one. "oh, that's the old, original part of the house, with no artificial gravity and the worst toilets you've ever seen, but if you come through here you get to the new part which we added recently, we put in bi-fold doors, raised the ceiling height and put in this new kitchen".
What! So buying an iPhone X for my teen won't make them happy? How am I supposed to buy their love now?
I'd argue it'd make the problem worse (although as an ex-FBer, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about).
If the only 'reliable' news sources (as marked by FB) were actually paid for, then FB would probably avoid chosing the more expensive ones if they could. Thus, the only 'reliable' sources of news will be the cheap ones. "Cheap" and "reliable" aren't usually synonymous.
For example, let's say both the BBC and Fox News have coverage of (say) Trump's 30% tariff on solar panels. The BBC generally do a pretty good job of being as unbiased as possible (although sometimes don't go very deep into a story), whereas it's generally thought that Fox are rather biased and partisan (and some say unreliable, erroneous etc).
Now, one of my friends posts a link to the BBC and another to the Fox coverage of the same story. Of all the people that view those two posts, exactly 50% click on one but not the other, and so both get the same number of clicks. However, the BBC costs FB $0.01/click more than Fox, and that news is starting to go crazy-viral and it looks like it's spreading throughout FB rapidly. FB would (obviously) realise that if 50% of their users click the BBC link, it'll cost them hundreds of thousands more than if people clicked the Fox links. As such, the Fox one gets surfaced more than the BBC.
Now, if you're the owner of a crappy news outlet like Fox, then you're doing very well - even though you're cheaper than the BBC, you're making more money than them. You've also managed to get your skewed view of the world in front of more eyeballs, and maybe had a few secondary clicks and whatnot too (all at the expense of the BBC).
As the outside observer, does this sound like a good outcome? Is it better than what we have now?