What a coincidence! The people who think it's a good idea, think it's legal. And the people who think it's a bad idea, think it's illegal.
Where are the people saying "It's awesome we're doing this stuff, but unfortuantely, we need to pass an amendment to legalize it," and the "This is undesirable and contrary to the country's interests, but the constitution clearly does grant the government this power," people?
When I see people split along the lines they're splitting on, I think everyone is full of shit.
Yeah, ok: even me.;-) But that doesn't undermine my point!
The original MacOS had it right - there was no command line at all, at any level... [GUI] was an effective way to do the job.
No, that UI paradigm was seen at incomplete and not-enough, long before Jobs came back in the late 1990s. That's why they needed AppleScript: to make it usable, for those situations where people don't have time to manually sort through and click on thousands of things. To turn hours of error-prone human tedium into seconds.
GUI will never be the only UI. GUIs are too slow and cumbersome, too manual and labor-intensive, for situations where you have lots of things you have to do.
Or to look at it another way, no OS comes with everything that everyone needs, out of the box. Some people need additional apps, and those apps are written using programming languages. Those apps are not written by some programmer clicking on things in Finder, because there are zillions of very useful things that you can dream up, which Finder has no way to express. There's a reason we're talking to each other in words right now, rather than futilely trying to draw pictures.
What GUIs excel at, is giving people a way to do things that are already well-understood and have a plan already made for them. (And which don't involve any sort of hideous quantities of objects.) And having "a plan for everything anyone might ever want to do" is something that can only happen after we've all turned into zombies; until then, we'll all be too creative.
Complete PS2 collection? You better have a 1TB drive.
OMG, that could cost me.. *shudder*.. sixty dollars! That's almost as much as a whole new game, and an entire ten percent of the cost of a newest-generation console!
Ergo, my country needs to invade and pillage another country.
But (sorry, Republicans!): do it cheaply. If you spend more money on the aggression than you pillage, obviously that's not going to count as a net injection of capital.
One thing you've gotta admit about Tor, is that it's an inefficient way to get packets from point A to point B. If we had Tor built into the all Internet protocols, don't you think one of the first things you would do, would be to look at some case where you didn't like the performance you were getting, and then you'd "invent" a shiny new protocol that directly links two points, providing massive performance improvements at the cost of making traffic analysis easier? And don't you think there are shitloads of applications, where that tradeoff would make sense? Inventing not-Tor would be the biggest thing, ever.
Crypto is good. Modern CPUs can handle it effortlessly, nearly for "free." There are some cases (e.g. shared caches) where you might not want the tradeoff, but overall it's turning out to be a no-brainer, almost always worth the compromise. You just can't say that about onion routing, though. It's subjectively good, at best.
BTW, also: here in America, a lot of us have asymmetric connections for the "last mile."
Yes. Remember that scene in "Annie Hall" when he said he sometimes fantasized about turning his car into the oncoming lane, dying in a fiery crash? Remember what happened at the end of "The Deer Hunter?" That wasn't acting; that was him talking from the heart. He was suicidal, and it was only a matter of time.
It's fairly accepted that just because a car is left unlocked doesn't mean anyone's allowed to go in and take what's inside it.
Unfortunately, it's also fairly accepted that there are such things as "attractive nuisances."
Classic example is the swimming pool on your private property, where you ruthlessly shoot and kill all trespassers whenever you see them climbing the electrified barbed wire fence around your pool. As long as you successfully kill each one of them before they get to the pool, you're safe. But if one of them makes it to the pool, jumps in and drowns, his family is the new owner of your house. Then you have to spend one of your family member's lives in order to get it back (tip: have cement trucks idling out in front of the house before your family member's counter-suicide-sacrifice, waiting and ready to fill in the pool, the instant that you re-acquire ownership).
It gets worse.
Suppose you're on patrol in your car, driving around the perimeter of your property, looking for pool-suiciders before they get too close to your pool. Suddenly you see a mob of them pushing against the fence on the east side. You take the M16 from your car's gun rack, go stand by the fence, and shoot them all. Now you've got this stinking pile of rotting corpses over by the fence, and you know you have only 10 minutes at the most, before Municipal Zoning Enforcement comes over and condemns your property. So you put the M16 back onto your gun rack, take the shovel out of the trunk, and start digging a mass grave.
Little do you know, that the mob you just massacred was TEAM A. That's the decoy team. Meanwhile, upon hearing the sound of the gunfire, TEAM B and TEAM C put on the bypass clips to reroute the current on the north fence, cut through the wires, and advance onto your property.
TEAM C immediately heads toward the pool area at maximum speed, while TEAM B stealthily sneaks toward your car, parked over by the east fence. They peek around from behind your car, and see you digging the mass grave. Now is their chance! They break into the car, and take the M16 off your gunrack. Just then, you hear an alert siren and your radio crackles to life. "MAYDAY! MAYDAY!" your wife in the tower yells, in a panic, over the radio, "People are jumping into the pool!" You hear the distant sound of rifle fire (she is now shooting at TEAM C).
The body burying can wait. You need to get to the pool area now, to help your wife kill pool-jumpers and then try to pump the pool water out of the lungs of anyone who has already drowned. You throw down your shovel and run toward the car, and that's where you see.. oh fuck, who is that? There's four dudes milling around your car. One of them sees you and and yells "he's coming! Now! Give it to me! Here!" and grabs the M16 out of one of the other thieves' hands. He quickly shoots the other members of his team, and then puts the end of the barrel into his mouth. You're running right at him, and in just a few more seco--pop. He falls to the ground.
You're fucked. That M16 was an attractive nuisance. You are responsible for all four of the deaths around the car, and who knows how many people have already made it into the pool by now. You grab the M16, throw it onto the passenger seat, jump into the car, and hit the gas. One of the members of TEAM B, as he died, fell such that he was partly under your car, and so now your rear Firestone tire drives over his head, crushing it, spilling jellied brains onto the dirt. Bump. The M16 slips down the passenger seat and.. what happened? Did it? You're in shock. It takes a few seconds to register. "Hey, my leg," you say, stunned.
"Oh fuck, my leg." Just when things were at their darkest,this happened! Un-fucking-believable. You don't hear your wife firing in the distance any more. She's probably worried. Totally demoralized and surrendered, mayb
A man can choose to kill himself. I have no problem with that. On the other hand, the moment the government has a say, any say under what circumstances you can ask to be killed is a big, and enormous no no. Once this door is breached we as a society can never go back.
A lot of us think that you just called the status quo a big no no, and that you're talking about a door that has already been breached (e.g. Kevorkian's prosecution). Doc-assisted suicide is seen as a possible solution to the big no no that we're currently enduring, and legalizing it is seen as closing the unclosable door.
I can't really disagree that he's speaking out of anger and that his comments should be taken with a grain of salt. You're basically right. But:
When you go into threats of killing someone, your political discourse has gone way too far.
I disagree with that general statement. Politics is about government, and government is about force. We all want our governments to sometimes kill people, and all the quibbling is about the conditions within "sometimes."
If killing people is just totally off the table and out of scope, then you're not really talking about politics.
You might even say Civilization is all about limiting death threats to politics, getting the threats out killing people out of non-political discourse. That way, we don't have to threaten to kill people in duals over mathematical or literary or technical discourse, for example.;-)
No, it's perfectly constitutional: if you drive on a road, you might cross a state border at some point, after which the contents of your blood or the blood itself could be extracted and resold, therefore inspecting them clearly falls under the Interstate Commerce Clause.
And even if you don't cross the border or have plans to cross, or have enough gas in your tank for sufficient range to cross the border, your blood's presence still has an effect on the interstate blood market.
Your licence to drive a car on the road is conditional on you being sober / no impaired. This is something you agree to when you get/renew a licence. You make a choice to get/renew your licence. You make a choice to drive drunk/impaired.
Take it easy with that zoom lens. We're talking about everyone, not just the drunks. On average, that means we're really mostly talking about people who are not drunk or impaired. They still got swabbed. They were not suspected of any crime, there was no probable cause to justify the violation of their privacy, and yet still it happened. Why?
There are one and a half failures happening here:
1) [the full failure] We don't enforce the 4th amendment. We simply just don't like that law, we don't value it, we don't agree with the thinking that led to its creation, and we wish that we didn't have that law. Most people think the 4th amendment is some kind of cop-out, intended to prevent criminals from being prosecuted. We don't realize that the real point of it, is to get the fucking government out of all our fucking faces when we're not committing crimes, and that the situation where the 4th amendment is relevant to a criminal case, is overall a rare "don't care" case which is hardly worth worrying about. It's the other 99.999% of life that we should care about, but we're fixated on the anomalous (crime) so we think the 4th is basically a stupid idea.
2) [the partial failure] Your license to drive a car isn't merely conditional on you being unimpaired, obeying traffic laws, etc. In most states, it's also conditional on you "consenting" to invasive searches. That's probably a bad idea, and everyone instantly realizes the problem, when they're asked to be searched for no reason. Sure, the government doesn't "punish" you if say no. Instead, they "withdraw your privilege" (the license to use a car on public roads). That distinction is both fair and also totally bullshit unfair; it's blurry. Part of this goes back to my first point, where if we really agreed with the reasons for the 4th amendment, then this wouldn't be one of the conditions for driving in the first place, so we could just avoid this whole issue. But since we dislike the 4th, we're constantly looking for ways to subvert the values behind it. Thus, the weird condition for driver's licenses.
anything more involved (forms, interactive PDFs, portfolios, etc.) and they both just shit the bed.
It's 2013 and still not a single documented sighting of any user ever wanting any of those things from a PDF. Thus, it sounds like you're saying Chrome perfectly does everything, that anyone might ever need.
Most of them all just walked by, ignoring her. She might be jaw-droppingly gorgeous 36-24-36 redhead with pouty lips in a light dress, but she was clearly crazy, waving that weird plastic thing around. "You!" she urgently growled, as she seized a suited man's lapels. "Can you help me read this? It's the only copy!" This looked like a successful man, so surely he could afford a decent computer, right?
He blushed. He wanted her, and maybe could use it to get her back to his place, but the lie would eventually come out. And this woman had just the sort of sincere bearing, that he knew the lie would be punished, not accepted. He sighed. He glanced at the disc again, just to make sure what he was seeing, and sighed. "No. Sorry. What is that, anyway?"
She let go, and cast her glance around the crowd.
And that's when it happened: Drinkypoo. The moment she saw him, she knew. This was the one. She didn't even have to ask, because she knew. But she decided to ask anyway, so that he could have the pleasure of saying yes and offering to help. It would be the first of many pleasures that he would experience.
"Can you read it? There are some really important files from the 1990s on here. I've got to have them. I'll do anything, Drinkypoo. Anything."
There was a time when Drinkypoo would have grinned nervously, or asked followup questions. But by now, he knew the story. He didn't want to hear the story anymore; he just wanted the reward. Drinkypoo didn't so much as even glance at the disk. Why so many unbelievable hot women always had invested in LS120s and floppies to store their critical records, he didn't know. Maybe some freak effect of a one-shot Imation advertising campaign, long ago. No one even really knew why, for sure; they just knew that a shitload of the drives had somehow ended up in the possession of that demographic.
He squinted and recalled his depleted inventory. That blonde with the 1.4MB floppy from two nights ago. "Got to stop at the drugstore on the way. C'mon," he replied. She stuffed the disc into her purse for safekeeping and they walked to his car.
Half an hour later, at his place, she sat on the couch, nervously clutching her purse containing the precious disc. Drinkypoo sauntered over, and held out the glass of rye bourbon on ice. "Here, relax. Everything's going to be okay." She sighed with relief, set her purse upon the coffee table, accepted the glass and sipped. "Thanks."
"You can't imagine what this means to me," (though Drinkypoo actually knew very well), "I need those files so badly." She reached for his belt buckle for a brief moment, but paused. "First things first, though, I suppose."
Drinkpoo shrugged. What did it matter to him? It would all work out the same. This was going to be fun no matter which order things occured. "Sure." He walked over to the computer desk and nudged the mouse, waking it up from sleep, casting monitor light across the room. "Let's have the disc."
She smiled, and reached into her purse, pulling out a.."
[CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE:
1).. gun.
2).. Zip or Jaz disc.
3).. 3.5" floppy or LS120 disc. (Drinkypoo, it will cost you 0.01 BTC for me to write this version.)
How can the topic of "Memories of Blockbuster" not be full of rants about their censorship? Well, "censorship" is maybe too harsh a word, but they rented out butchered versions of movies. If you were into horror (especially slasher/gore sub-genres) Blockbuster was unusable and you got ripped off, every time. (If you were already very familiar with the name Peter Jackson before those LotR movies, then you know what I'm talkin' about.)
It wasn't even late fees that drove me to their competitors; it was something as simple and easy as integrity. And considering the kind of trash I'm into, it's a pretty fucking low bar, when someone like me says you don't have integrity.
Fuck Blockbuster. I hope their owners die homeless and starving, their children sold into the sex slave trade.
Why do porn sites have more malware than other sites?
Simple, really. Tell a sports fan, "Save as. Wait. Type 'mount' and press enter. No, in the other window. Mount. Yes. Does your/home say noexec next to it? Yes, in parenthesis. I don't care about nodev, I asked about noexec. Oh, good. JUST A MINUTE, this won't take long if you just do what I say. Save as, malware.sh in your home directory. Your home directory. Now, type 'chmod +x malware.sh' Yes. Yes. No, chmod. C as in Catcher. H as in Halfback. M as in Mitt. O as in Outfield? What?! Too much work? Look, I'm sorry, but if you want your sports, then you -- hello? HELLO?"
Now tell a porn surfer, "Save as. Wait. type 'mount' and press enter. Does your/home say noexec next to it? Ok. Save as, malware.sh in your home directory. Now, type 'chmod +x malware.sh' C as in Cunt. H as in Hot. M as in MILF. O as in Orgasm. D as in Dirty. Yes. Plus X. Now type 'sudo./malware.sh'. Yes. Your password. No, your own password. Yes. Yes. AHA!!! GOT YOU! YOUR COMPUTER IS MINE!!!"
It sounds like Android needs the phone call equivalent of user-agent spoofing. Carriers should never have any way of determining what sort of device is being used.
Sure calling a contact and exchanging fingerprints seems like loads of fun but it's impractical at scale.
Doing that is unnecessary at massive scale. What's cool about PGP is that you can do it, if you want MitM-proof protection, and that doing this seamlessly fits in with doing things the easy/unsafe way. If you don't care about MitM, then you don't have to do a lot of signing, and you can just fall back to the unverified key use that today's e-commerce uses. A system which "doesn't scale" is working just fine for amazon and your bank, except that some people say it's not "just fine" at all, because in the rare event that you actually care about security, the system doesn't let you create a second and better trust path than the one you have through Verisign. They say, "Huh, I don't remember meeting Verisign and getting their fingerprint and signing their keyid and also determining that I trust them a little bit. So how did this file get into my/etc/ssl/certs?" But that's the people who care. Let's get back to the unwashed masses...
People at the edge of the "unwashed masses" can move up and down across the threshold, go through phases of giving a damn about things, or sometimes simply by being pushed. PGP works great in an environment like that, where some people are apathetic and some people try. Want to have a keysigning party during a moment of enthusiasm and then go for a few years of not doing it? That's totally cool, and yet in the years after the keysigning party you get to benefit from it.
But you don't even have to do that. Consider this. Suppose your workplace (I'm assuming you work somewhere, where employees don't currently encrypt messages to each other, or else they use an obsolete system such as S/MIME) switched to something like what CreatureComfort suggests. Don't you agree that at least some employees (two? you and one other?) might make the effort to verify each others' keys? Or that some IT admin might go around to everyone (even the apathetic ones) and sign them and insist they at least sign him (sort of like what corporate S/MIME users do)? You'd get pretty much the same intranet security as S/MIME, except that the different social and business connections of each of the employees, would all be waiting to expand and make this local web start tying other webs together.
Then add something as simple as spousal signing (surely you'd agree that "sign your wife's key" scales! How many wives do you have?!), families (sign your brother, mother, etc) and suddenly you have inter-company MitM protection and other six-degrees-from-kevin-bacon-ness phenomena that I can't even being to describe or even imagine. I think you just might have it exactly backwards, in terms of such a thing not "scaling." All it takes is for people to sign a few people close to them, and things get very strong (compared to plaintext), very fast. It might not be foolproof, but it'd be better than the status quo that billions of dollars per year of commerce already uses. And everywhere you need to make it foolproof (i.e. you really care, so we're talking about a not-unwashed-masses situations) you use the same damn keys, but blow off the rest of the WoT (since you don't trust it enough) and directly cert someone/something.
And then probably share that signature on the WoT, for the next guy, if he doesn't have the time or quite enough passion to do that direct certification himself.
Slashdot Mirror
What a coincidence! The people who think it's a good idea, think it's legal. And the people who think it's a bad idea, think it's illegal.
Where are the people saying "It's awesome we're doing this stuff, but unfortuantely, we need to pass an amendment to legalize it," and the "This is undesirable and contrary to the country's interests, but the constitution clearly does grant the government this power," people?
When I see people split along the lines they're splitting on, I think everyone is full of shit.
Yeah, ok: even me. ;-) But that doesn't undermine my point!
No, that UI paradigm was seen at incomplete and not-enough, long before Jobs came back in the late 1990s. That's why they needed AppleScript: to make it usable, for those situations where people don't have time to manually sort through and click on thousands of things. To turn hours of error-prone human tedium into seconds.
GUI will never be the only UI. GUIs are too slow and cumbersome, too manual and labor-intensive, for situations where you have lots of things you have to do.
Or to look at it another way, no OS comes with everything that everyone needs, out of the box. Some people need additional apps, and those apps are written using programming languages. Those apps are not written by some programmer clicking on things in Finder, because there are zillions of very useful things that you can dream up, which Finder has no way to express. There's a reason we're talking to each other in words right now, rather than futilely trying to draw pictures.
What GUIs excel at, is giving people a way to do things that are already well-understood and have a plan already made for them. (And which don't involve any sort of hideous quantities of objects.) And having "a plan for everything anyone might ever want to do" is something that can only happen after we've all turned into zombies; until then, we'll all be too creative.
OMG, that could cost me .. *shudder* .. sixty dollars! That's almost as much as a whole new game, and an entire ten percent of the cost of a newest-generation console!
Please go correct the wikipedia entry. Some arsehole has typed in the wrong country name!
Dollars are not shares which pay dividends either, but BoA has somehow assigned as value to those, too.
WOULD HAVE been stolen equally? Science without actual experiments is not science, Mr. String Theory!
Nice experiment. Which side of the bag is stolen the least often?
The good news is that these will only cost $70.
The bad news is that the lenses are used up after 2 months, and cost $65 to replace.
Ergo, my country needs to invade and pillage another country.
But (sorry, Republicans!): do it cheaply. If you spend more money on the aggression than you pillage, obviously that's not going to count as a net injection of capital.
One thing you've gotta admit about Tor, is that it's an inefficient way to get packets from point A to point B. If we had Tor built into the all Internet protocols, don't you think one of the first things you would do, would be to look at some case where you didn't like the performance you were getting, and then you'd "invent" a shiny new protocol that directly links two points, providing massive performance improvements at the cost of making traffic analysis easier? And don't you think there are shitloads of applications, where that tradeoff would make sense? Inventing not-Tor would be the biggest thing, ever.
Crypto is good. Modern CPUs can handle it effortlessly, nearly for "free." There are some cases (e.g. shared caches) where you might not want the tradeoff, but overall it's turning out to be a no-brainer, almost always worth the compromise. You just can't say that about onion routing, though. It's subjectively good, at best.
BTW, also: here in America, a lot of us have asymmetric connections for the "last mile."
Yes. Remember that scene in "Annie Hall" when he said he sometimes fantasized about turning his car into the oncoming lane, dying in a fiery crash? Remember what happened at the end of "The Deer Hunter?" That wasn't acting; that was him talking from the heart. He was suicidal, and it was only a matter of time.
Unfortunately, it's also fairly accepted that there are such things as "attractive nuisances."
Classic example is the swimming pool on your private property, where you ruthlessly shoot and kill all trespassers whenever you see them climbing the electrified barbed wire fence around your pool. As long as you successfully kill each one of them before they get to the pool, you're safe. But if one of them makes it to the pool, jumps in and drowns, his family is the new owner of your house. Then you have to spend one of your family member's lives in order to get it back (tip: have cement trucks idling out in front of the house before your family member's counter-suicide-sacrifice, waiting and ready to fill in the pool, the instant that you re-acquire ownership).
It gets worse.
Suppose you're on patrol in your car, driving around the perimeter of your property, looking for pool-suiciders before they get too close to your pool. Suddenly you see a mob of them pushing against the fence on the east side. You take the M16 from your car's gun rack, go stand by the fence, and shoot them all. Now you've got this stinking pile of rotting corpses over by the fence, and you know you have only 10 minutes at the most, before Municipal Zoning Enforcement comes over and condemns your property. So you put the M16 back onto your gun rack, take the shovel out of the trunk, and start digging a mass grave.
Little do you know, that the mob you just massacred was TEAM A. That's the decoy team. Meanwhile, upon hearing the sound of the gunfire, TEAM B and TEAM C put on the bypass clips to reroute the current on the north fence, cut through the wires, and advance onto your property.
TEAM C immediately heads toward the pool area at maximum speed, while TEAM B stealthily sneaks toward your car, parked over by the east fence. They peek around from behind your car, and see you digging the mass grave. Now is their chance! They break into the car, and take the M16 off your gunrack. Just then, you hear an alert siren and your radio crackles to life. "MAYDAY! MAYDAY!" your wife in the tower yells, in a panic, over the radio, "People are jumping into the pool!" You hear the distant sound of rifle fire (she is now shooting at TEAM C).
The body burying can wait. You need to get to the pool area now, to help your wife kill pool-jumpers and then try to pump the pool water out of the lungs of anyone who has already drowned. You throw down your shovel and run toward the car, and that's where you see .. oh fuck, who is that? There's four dudes milling around your car. One of them sees you and and yells "he's coming! Now! Give it to me! Here!" and grabs the M16 out of one of the other thieves' hands. He quickly shoots the other members of his team, and then puts the end of the barrel into his mouth. You're running right at him, and in just a few more seco--pop. He falls to the ground.
You're fucked. That M16 was an attractive nuisance. You are responsible for all four of the deaths around the car, and who knows how many people have already made it into the pool by now. You grab the M16, throw it onto the passenger seat, jump into the car, and hit the gas. One of the members of TEAM B, as he died, fell such that he was partly under your car, and so now your rear Firestone tire drives over his head, crushing it, spilling jellied brains onto the dirt. Bump. The M16 slips down the passenger seat and .. what happened? Did it? You're in shock. It takes a few seconds to register. "Hey, my leg," you say, stunned.
"Oh fuck, my leg." Just when things were at their darkest,this happened! Un-fucking-believable. You don't hear your wife firing in the distance any more. She's probably worried. Totally demoralized and surrendered, mayb
A lot of us think that you just called the status quo a big no no, and that you're talking about a door that has already been breached (e.g. Kevorkian's prosecution). Doc-assisted suicide is seen as a possible solution to the big no no that we're currently enduring, and legalizing it is seen as closing the unclosable door.
I can't really disagree that he's speaking out of anger and that his comments should be taken with a grain of salt. You're basically right. But:
I disagree with that general statement. Politics is about government, and government is about force. We all want our governments to sometimes kill people, and all the quibbling is about the conditions within "sometimes."
If killing people is just totally off the table and out of scope, then you're not really talking about politics.
You might even say Civilization is all about limiting death threats to politics, getting the threats out killing people out of non-political discourse. That way, we don't have to threaten to kill people in duals over mathematical or literary or technical discourse, for example. ;-)
People: "FEC, how should we report these transactions?"
FEC: "We will punish you, if you report these transactions."
People: "Ok, we won't report these transactions."
Problem solved.
And even if you don't cross the border or have plans to cross, or have enough gas in your tank for sufficient range to cross the border, your blood's presence still has an effect on the interstate blood market.
Take it easy with that zoom lens. We're talking about everyone, not just the drunks. On average, that means we're really mostly talking about people who are not drunk or impaired. They still got swabbed. They were not suspected of any crime, there was no probable cause to justify the violation of their privacy, and yet still it happened. Why?
There are one and a half failures happening here:
1) [the full failure] We don't enforce the 4th amendment. We simply just don't like that law, we don't value it, we don't agree with the thinking that led to its creation, and we wish that we didn't have that law. Most people think the 4th amendment is some kind of cop-out, intended to prevent criminals from being prosecuted. We don't realize that the real point of it, is to get the fucking government out of all our fucking faces when we're not committing crimes, and that the situation where the 4th amendment is relevant to a criminal case, is overall a rare "don't care" case which is hardly worth worrying about. It's the other 99.999% of life that we should care about, but we're fixated on the anomalous (crime) so we think the 4th is basically a stupid idea.
2) [the partial failure] Your license to drive a car isn't merely conditional on you being unimpaired, obeying traffic laws, etc. In most states, it's also conditional on you "consenting" to invasive searches. That's probably a bad idea, and everyone instantly realizes the problem, when they're asked to be searched for no reason. Sure, the government doesn't "punish" you if say no. Instead, they "withdraw your privilege" (the license to use a car on public roads). That distinction is both fair and also totally bullshit unfair; it's blurry. Part of this goes back to my first point, where if we really agreed with the reasons for the 4th amendment, then this wouldn't be one of the conditions for driving in the first place, so we could just avoid this whole issue. But since we dislike the 4th, we're constantly looking for ways to subvert the values behind it. Thus, the weird condition for driver's licenses.
It's 2013 and still not a single documented sighting of any user ever wanting any of those things from a PDF. Thus, it sounds like you're saying Chrome perfectly does everything, that anyone might ever need.
"Help! Help!" she cried.
Most of them all just walked by, ignoring her. She might be jaw-droppingly gorgeous 36-24-36 redhead with pouty lips in a light dress, but she was clearly crazy, waving that weird plastic thing around. "You!" she urgently growled, as she seized a suited man's lapels. "Can you help me read this? It's the only copy!" This looked like a successful man, so surely he could afford a decent computer, right?
He blushed. He wanted her, and maybe could use it to get her back to his place, but the lie would eventually come out. And this woman had just the sort of sincere bearing, that he knew the lie would be punished, not accepted. He sighed. He glanced at the disc again, just to make sure what he was seeing, and sighed. "No. Sorry. What is that, anyway?"
She let go, and cast her glance around the crowd.
And that's when it happened: Drinkypoo. The moment she saw him, she knew. This was the one. She didn't even have to ask, because she knew. But she decided to ask anyway, so that he could have the pleasure of saying yes and offering to help. It would be the first of many pleasures that he would experience.
"Can you read it? There are some really important files from the 1990s on here. I've got to have them. I'll do anything, Drinkypoo. Anything."
There was a time when Drinkypoo would have grinned nervously, or asked followup questions. But by now, he knew the story. He didn't want to hear the story anymore; he just wanted the reward. Drinkypoo didn't so much as even glance at the disk. Why so many unbelievable hot women always had invested in LS120s and floppies to store their critical records, he didn't know. Maybe some freak effect of a one-shot Imation advertising campaign, long ago. No one even really knew why, for sure; they just knew that a shitload of the drives had somehow ended up in the possession of that demographic.
He squinted and recalled his depleted inventory. That blonde with the 1.4MB floppy from two nights ago. "Got to stop at the drugstore on the way. C'mon," he replied. She stuffed the disc into her purse for safekeeping and they walked to his car.
Half an hour later, at his place, she sat on the couch, nervously clutching her purse containing the precious disc. Drinkypoo sauntered over, and held out the glass of rye bourbon on ice. "Here, relax. Everything's going to be okay." She sighed with relief, set her purse upon the coffee table, accepted the glass and sipped. "Thanks."
"You can't imagine what this means to me," (though Drinkypoo actually knew very well), "I need those files so badly." She reached for his belt buckle for a brief moment, but paused. "First things first, though, I suppose."
Drinkpoo shrugged. What did it matter to him? It would all work out the same. This was going to be fun no matter which order things occured. "Sure." He walked over to the computer desk and nudged the mouse, waking it up from sleep, casting monitor light across the room. "Let's have the disc."
She smiled, and reached into her purse, pulling out a .."
[CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE:
1) .. gun.
2) .. Zip or Jaz disc.
3) .. 3.5" floppy or LS120 disc. (Drinkypoo, it will cost you 0.01 BTC for me to write this version.)
]
No problem. Just invent "IP over video."
How can the topic of "Memories of Blockbuster" not be full of rants about their censorship? Well, "censorship" is maybe too harsh a word, but they rented out butchered versions of movies. If you were into horror (especially slasher/gore sub-genres) Blockbuster was unusable and you got ripped off, every time. (If you were already very familiar with the name Peter Jackson before those LotR movies, then you know what I'm talkin' about.)
It wasn't even late fees that drove me to their competitors; it was something as simple and easy as integrity. And considering the kind of trash I'm into, it's a pretty fucking low bar, when someone like me says you don't have integrity.
Fuck Blockbuster. I hope their owners die homeless and starving, their children sold into the sex slave trade.
Simple, really. Tell a sports fan, "Save as. Wait. Type 'mount' and press enter. No, in the other window. Mount. Yes. Does your /home say noexec next to it? Yes, in parenthesis. I don't care about nodev, I asked about noexec. Oh, good. JUST A MINUTE, this won't take long if you just do what I say. Save as, malware.sh in your home directory. Your home directory. Now, type 'chmod +x malware.sh' Yes. Yes. No, chmod. C as in Catcher. H as in Halfback. M as in Mitt. O as in Outfield? What?! Too much work? Look, I'm sorry, but if you want your sports, then you -- hello? HELLO?"
Now tell a porn surfer, "Save as. Wait. type 'mount' and press enter. Does your /home say noexec next to it? Ok. Save as, malware.sh in your home directory. Now, type 'chmod +x malware.sh' C as in Cunt. H as in Hot. M as in MILF. O as in Orgasm. D as in Dirty. Yes. Plus X. Now type 'sudo ./malware.sh'. Yes. Your password. No, your own password. Yes. Yes. AHA!!! GOT YOU! YOUR COMPUTER IS MINE!!!"
See the difference?
It sounds like Android needs the phone call equivalent of user-agent spoofing. Carriers should never have any way of determining what sort of device is being used.
The content is really on the page; they just added it a little more to it (went to extra trouble!), to make their site fail.
I guess browsers need "pay attention to refresh" to become an opt-in option.
Doing that is unnecessary at massive scale. What's cool about PGP is that you can do it, if you want MitM-proof protection, and that doing this seamlessly fits in with doing things the easy/unsafe way. If you don't care about MitM, then you don't have to do a lot of signing, and you can just fall back to the unverified key use that today's e-commerce uses. A system which "doesn't scale" is working just fine for amazon and your bank, except that some people say it's not "just fine" at all, because in the rare event that you actually care about security, the system doesn't let you create a second and better trust path than the one you have through Verisign. They say, "Huh, I don't remember meeting Verisign and getting their fingerprint and signing their keyid and also determining that I trust them a little bit. So how did this file get into my /etc/ssl/certs?" But that's the people who care. Let's get back to the unwashed masses...
People at the edge of the "unwashed masses" can move up and down across the threshold, go through phases of giving a damn about things, or sometimes simply by being pushed. PGP works great in an environment like that, where some people are apathetic and some people try. Want to have a keysigning party during a moment of enthusiasm and then go for a few years of not doing it? That's totally cool, and yet in the years after the keysigning party you get to benefit from it.
But you don't even have to do that. Consider this. Suppose your workplace (I'm assuming you work somewhere, where employees don't currently encrypt messages to each other, or else they use an obsolete system such as S/MIME) switched to something like what CreatureComfort suggests. Don't you agree that at least some employees (two? you and one other?) might make the effort to verify each others' keys? Or that some IT admin might go around to everyone (even the apathetic ones) and sign them and insist they at least sign him (sort of like what corporate S/MIME users do)? You'd get pretty much the same intranet security as S/MIME, except that the different social and business connections of each of the employees, would all be waiting to expand and make this local web start tying other webs together.
Then add something as simple as spousal signing (surely you'd agree that "sign your wife's key" scales! How many wives do you have?!), families (sign your brother, mother, etc) and suddenly you have inter-company MitM protection and other six-degrees-from-kevin-bacon-ness phenomena that I can't even being to describe or even imagine. I think you just might have it exactly backwards, in terms of such a thing not "scaling." All it takes is for people to sign a few people close to them, and things get very strong (compared to plaintext), very fast. It might not be foolproof, but it'd be better than the status quo that billions of dollars per year of commerce already uses. And everywhere you need to make it foolproof (i.e. you really care, so we're talking about a not-unwashed-masses situations) you use the same damn keys, but blow off the rest of the WoT (since you don't trust it enough) and directly cert someone/something.
And then probably share that signature on the WoT, for the next guy, if he doesn't have the time or quite enough passion to do that direct certification himself.