As an IT security consultant, let me apologize on behalf of this entire industry.
Basically, there are two ways to make money in this field:
1. Develop a careful methodology, based on meeting customer requirements, for collecting and analyzing data; write up reports in clear language (WORDS have MEANINGS!) to minimize ambiguities and tailor information to help customers manage their risk.
or,
2. Spread FUD.
There is a LOT of pushback among the vendors against developing any kind of clear methods because the existing ones are so good at raking in the dough...so why develop new ones? For instance, in the past couple of years I've seen lots of sites with "baselines" for network "attack traffic" and they will issue reports when the amount of traffic exceeds the baseline. Unfortunately, this is invariably simply an application of confidence intervals, usually applied in such a way that violates the statistical underpinnings of the technique. You, as the customer, are never told the methods, nor anything that you might use to evaluate the quality of the reporting.
So how useful is it, really? How useful are "customizable reports" from some engine mailing you PDFs every 8 hours saying, here's the Top 10 Ports (wow, 25, 53, and 80 are in the top 3 again! Whodathunkit)?
I would really like to push for higher standards, but you get pushbacks from the business development people, you get pushback from your colleagues (because, being nerds, they must immediately challenge anything you say--thanks, Neal Stephenson), and in the end the customer suffers. So, again, I'm really sorry. I'd like to change things but at this point I have no idea how to start.
The result is a sometimes exasperated incomprehension on the part of the more extroverted.
Pretty much everything introverts do results in exasperation and incomprehension on the part of extroverts.
My friends: "What do you mean, you don't want to go out for drinks?" Me: "I mean, I had a rough week, and I'm entirely wiped out." Friends: "Exactly, that's why you should come out to a noisy social environment where you can be surrounded by random strangers who want your attention." Me: *shudder* Alright, but only if you can get me drunk enough to deal within 5 minutes of arrival. Friends: Deal!
My very fucking point is that men are more vulnerable than women.
Lolocopter, etc. This is how the thread ends...not with a bang, but with a whimper.
The stats you have posted do not bear this out when you break it out into categories. Simply put, guys get in fights and you call it "assault." Women get raped in a parking garage, and you call it "assault."
I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt up until this point but you have just lost it. You, sir, are an idiot.
Yep. Imagine that "danger" is a quantifiable variable.
Before women got preferential parking, they had 100 units of "danger" associated with finding their car late at night. Men had 10 units of danger.
Now women have 50 units of danger, and men also have 50 units of danger.
You don't acknowledge the fact that women are more vulnerable to begin with; the playing field is not level from the start. This is what the feminists call "unacknowledged privilege." It infuriates them. Me, I just understand you HAVEN'T given this any serious thought.
Bullshit. If you saw violent crimes every day, perpetrated by guys in red sweatshirts, next time you saw a red sweatshirt you'd assume the guy was up to no good. All of us would. But you don't know exactly how many people are wearing the same clothes, so you make a judgement call.
You'd probably be wrong, but if you and I both saw the same things, at least I'd understand. I wouldn't be "without sympathy," I'd have a shitload of sympathy. I would still set you right though.
In the US, something like 97% of victims of sexual assault are female, and the overwhelming majority of these are perpetrated by males.
Are the statistics so radically different in the US?
The OP is complaining because he thinks people are using inductive reasoning to say, basically, "All rapists are males, so he might be a rapist." In fact, most males are not rapists, so he feels somewhat put upon.
But, as with other violent crimes, say if only one subset of the population does this--one confluence of factors like age, socioeconomic status, etc., then it's perfectly valid to profile a someone as a "possible" even when you don't know everything else about them.
I'm sure this would be a great application of Bayesian stats if I could figure it out--from a Bayesian standpoint, a subjective standpoint--which is how most people operate--you would ask "What are the odds this guy's a rapist? Whereas from a traditional statistical analysis you would say, what are the odds of picking a male rapist out of the general population?
In any case, from either perspective it is somewhat unfair, but once you understand how people make these decisions--is the guy in the library a potential child molester or what?--you UNDERSTAND their position. Pissing and moaning about it doesn't help. If there is a constructive way to fight this kind of prejudice, I'd love to know what it is.
1. Those are not "personal" issues for most people--terrorism and drug running, for example, do not personally affect people like the thought of "rape" does.
2. Those crimes are generally universal in their application. If a woman is going to get raped there is an overwhelming probability it will be by a man. Terrorist attacks are not that discriminatory.
3. There are plenty of examples of terrorists who are not muslims, gang members who are not mexicans, etc. Crime statistics are only incidentally congruent with race, and are FUNCTIONALLY congruent with economic class and age. So, I would definately support profiling poor young males as criminals, not just "Mexicans."
Finally...rape is a much more emotionally charged issue. We can discuss gang violence pretty dispassionately compared to the reactions people have when you talk about rape. I don't really expect people to react logically. For all that, most of the women I know are not fearful of me as a potential rapist or child molester, and when I encounter it, I UNDERSTAND WHY THEY FEEL THAT WAY, so I don't take it personally.
I'm a little confused...not to make you responsible for this argument, but...
We have one faction here who says, basically, 911 is a joke so I'm going to live in a fortress community and when I'm not there, I and my family, including newborns, will be packing. We will drop anyone who acts remotely threatening.
Then we have the faction who says, you are macho idiots for saying that, and cowards to boot.
We need some common sense to navigate between these!...Not to mention to accurately depict them, rather than frame one side as a bunch of pussies and the other as a bunch of armed sociopaths.
I agree with you that the cops are not the sole guardians of society. So what exactly do you propose be put into practice?
Right now I'm living in Germany. They have taken some non-police steps to reduce the incidence of rape and assault on women (since some majority of assaults are by men upon women). For instance, women get preferential parking in garages--near the door and near the security station, so they don't have to walk late at night through a dark garage alone. There are also phones on the trains that they can use so when they're getting off at a stop late at night, there can be a taxi waiting on them.
What is your opinion of these measures? Is this the sort of thing you mean, or something else?
Unfortunately, Fark headlines aside, the vast majority of child molesters are men and the vast majority of rapists are men. It sucks but it's something we have to put up with...don't blame Dateline for presenting the facts.
Macho bullshit aside, his point remains valid: There are those of us who are never threatened by crime, and then there are those of us who are victimized, for whom the government protection we paid for failed, and typically for whom the government-enforced justice we paid for fails. When you compare crime rates to conviction rates, you see that the vast majority of crimes go unsolved and unpunished.
So what exactly are we paying for? I want the cops out there finding violent criminals and putting rapists behind bars, not harassing kids for skateboarding at the Lincoln Monument.
But I make ~$150k and I don't even have a bachelor's degree.
Three simple rules: 1) Who you know > what you know. 2) What you've done > what you know. 3) What you know != what classes you have taken, degrees obtained, etc.
No. Then we would simply accuse the Chinese of genetically engineering athletes (or at least socially engineering them, which is for some reason worse in my mind). That's basically what everyone said about Yao Ming, remember?
Basically, they can't win for losing. Here are some examples of what the average Westerner thinks of China and the Chinese:
1. There are a lot of them, and living conditions universally suck (but they don't know it because the Great Firewall won't let them go to those sites) 2. They pretty much read agitprop all day about crushing enemies of the people, or about doing Taiwan a favor and "reunifying" them, or something. 3. Most have jobs staffing assembly lines, gleefully turning out ridiculously unsafe products made of things like pure arsenic or asbestos. This includes food products. All of these products are cheap knockoffs of existing products designed in the West (especially the food products) 4. The rest are goldfarmers or farmers, regular type (i.e., "peasants") 5. The government universally treats its citizens like crap, unless you are some sort of apparatchik (witness: evictions for the Olympics).
The Olympics is China's big chance, on the eve of them becoming a superpower, to dispell all of these ridiculous ideas. So far they are not doing especially well, probably because there is a nugget of truth in all of those outlandish preconceptions. They really need some kind of positive media coverage, especially since we're running out of Jackie Chan.
If they do pull it off, then they look good to the world (which up until now has been ambivalent/suspicious but not as angry as they are with, say, the USA). It would mean that they would have an easier time becoming a superpower and extending their influence. I think their mileage is going to vary, the exposure will be good but they're not going to get away with ANYTHING thanks to the internet.
I've studied them extensively. It's a terrible story. But I also know that the bastard sons and daughters of rape victims, and their children, are treated like shit by Chinese citizens largely because of government propaganda and general social stigma. And I know that there are people growing up in Japan who had nothing to do with the war, and Chinese people growing up who had nothing to do with the war, and I wonder why it's still an issue, other than that it's still being exploited for propaganda purposes.
This sort of relativism is unproductive. We're just going on circles arguing over which is worse, rather than determining if any actions are simply bad. And both sides are forced into ridiculous positions: America sends people to Gitmo, and the left doesn't like that, so they have to endorse China's human rights abuses instead? And China restricts access to the internet and threatens its neighbors, and conservatives don't like that, so they now HAVE to support sending people to Gitmo?
What the fuck? This is ridiculous. Why can't I simply say that human rights abuses and government censorship are universally bad? What right does some other schmuck have to tell me what positions I HAVE to take? Nothing is getting done.
Yeah, Mao could, but I most of his fighters weren't exactly warrior-poets. Check out his book on guerilla warfare, he devotes considerable ink to the problem of motivating the peasantry.
No matter how large, complex, or beautiful anything we make is, it is all essentially disposable. We inevitably attach sentiment to things like cars or houses or boats or gigantic cyclotrons but they are just...things.
Look, the Navy has all this romantic imagery associated with plying the seas in deadly warships (read "Choosers of the Slain" by Kipling) but almost all ships end up as razor blades or sunk for target practice. Likewise a lot of us have fun tinkering with computers...but over the past 5 years haven't we all broken down and rebuilt assorted Frankenboxes for this project or that project a hundred times over?
It's the adventure of DOING stuff with the things that is important, not the things themselves. As impressive as the cyclotron is, it's the science and discovery that are really meaningful.
Engineers are fortunate to have jobs that are congruent with their passions in life, but most artists are not. I know plenty of fine arts majors who work some job peripherally connected to their major (graphic design, advertising, etc.) so they can eat and pay the bills and pursue their actual passion.
For them it's not about "getting a job" to the same extent as it is for an engineer.
I disagree. The usefulness of trusting the military to a certain extent probably outweighs the usefulness of not trusting them at all. So, I shouldn't see their codes, because them being able to operate without being compromised by foreign agents is a more useful thing than me being able to look over their shoulder all the time.
But I do think that everything should be archived so that when we do have to do some investigation, we can.
Have you got some idea of what a true...I dunno, "open source" form of government would be like? One where anyone could, at any time, waltz into the President's Office and tell him "I'm just going to sit here and read your e-mails for an hour, don't mind me." How would that work? What kind of world would that work in? Could it work now? Sounds like a good submission to Asimov's:)
My boss buys us racks of beer and anytime after 3 in the afternoon if you enter our office you will see us with beers out, brainstorming, etc. You will also be offered a beer.
It's like the "so long as you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" argument: the definition of "right" is getting so narrow as to be ridiculous.
To use a networking metaphor...Our model of government is supposed to be one where the government's rights are whitelisted and everything else is by default given to the citizen, but we're moving towards a state where the government is blacklisting OUR actions.
"Right" and "wrong" have, sadly, never had absolute definitions and have proven to be quite malleable in tyrannies past.
Slashdot Mirror
As an IT security consultant, let me apologize on behalf of this entire industry.
Basically, there are two ways to make money in this field:
1. Develop a careful methodology, based on meeting customer requirements, for collecting and analyzing data; write up reports in clear language (WORDS have MEANINGS!) to minimize ambiguities and tailor information to help customers manage their risk.
or,
2. Spread FUD.
There is a LOT of pushback among the vendors against developing any kind of clear methods because the existing ones are so good at raking in the dough...so why develop new ones? For instance, in the past couple of years I've seen lots of sites with "baselines" for network "attack traffic" and they will issue reports when the amount of traffic exceeds the baseline. Unfortunately, this is invariably simply an application of confidence intervals, usually applied in such a way that violates the statistical underpinnings of the technique. You, as the customer, are never told the methods, nor anything that you might use to evaluate the quality of the reporting.
So how useful is it, really? How useful are "customizable reports" from some engine mailing you PDFs every 8 hours saying, here's the Top 10 Ports (wow, 25, 53, and 80 are in the top 3 again! Whodathunkit)?
I would really like to push for higher standards, but you get pushbacks from the business development people, you get pushback from your colleagues (because, being nerds, they must immediately challenge anything you say--thanks, Neal Stephenson), and in the end the customer suffers. So, again, I'm really sorry. I'd like to change things but at this point I have no idea how to start.
My friends: "What do you mean, you don't want to go out for drinks?"
Me: "I mean, I had a rough week, and I'm entirely wiped out."
Friends: "Exactly, that's why you should come out to a noisy social environment where you can be surrounded by random strangers who want your attention."
Me: *shudder* Alright, but only if you can get me drunk enough to deal within 5 minutes of arrival.
Friends: Deal!
My very fucking point is that men are more vulnerable than women.
Lolocopter, etc. This is how the thread ends...not with a bang, but with a whimper.
The stats you have posted do not bear this out when you break it out into categories.
Simply put, guys get in fights and you call it "assault."
Women get raped in a parking garage, and you call it "assault."
I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt up until this point but you have just lost it. You, sir, are an idiot.
Yep. Imagine that "danger" is a quantifiable variable.
Before women got preferential parking, they had 100 units of "danger" associated with finding their car late at night.
Men had 10 units of danger.
Now women have 50 units of danger, and men also have 50 units of danger.
You don't acknowledge the fact that women are more vulnerable to begin with; the playing field is not level from the start.
This is what the feminists call "unacknowledged privilege." It infuriates them. Me, I just understand you HAVEN'T given this any serious thought.
Bullshit. If you saw violent crimes every day, perpetrated by guys in red sweatshirts, next time you saw a red sweatshirt you'd assume the guy was up to no good. All of us would. But you don't know exactly how many people are wearing the same clothes, so you make a judgement call.
You'd probably be wrong, but if you and I both saw the same things, at least I'd understand. I wouldn't be "without sympathy," I'd have a shitload of sympathy. I would still set you right though.
By preventing rape...we increase the chances that men will be attacked, because men are more vulnerable than women.
Are you sure you've thought this through?
In the US, something like 97% of victims of sexual assault are female, and the overwhelming majority of these are perpetrated by males.
Are the statistics so radically different in the US?
The OP is complaining because he thinks people are using inductive reasoning to say, basically, "All rapists are males, so he might be a rapist." In fact, most males are not rapists, so he feels somewhat put upon.
But, as with other violent crimes, say if only one subset of the population does this--one confluence of factors like age, socioeconomic status, etc., then it's perfectly valid to profile a someone as a "possible" even when you don't know everything else about them.
I'm sure this would be a great application of Bayesian stats if I could figure it out--from a Bayesian standpoint, a subjective standpoint--which is how most people operate--you would ask "What are the odds this guy's a rapist? Whereas from a traditional statistical analysis you would say, what are the odds of picking a male rapist out of the general population?
In any case, from either perspective it is somewhat unfair, but once you understand how people make these decisions--is the guy in the library a potential child molester or what?--you UNDERSTAND their position. Pissing and moaning about it doesn't help. If there is a constructive way to fight this kind of prejudice, I'd love to know what it is.
There are some flaws in your analogy:
1. Those are not "personal" issues for most people--terrorism and drug running, for example, do not personally affect people like the thought of "rape" does.
2. Those crimes are generally universal in their application. If a woman is going to get raped there is an overwhelming probability it will be by a man. Terrorist attacks are not that discriminatory.
3. There are plenty of examples of terrorists who are not muslims, gang members who are not mexicans, etc. Crime statistics are only incidentally congruent with race, and are FUNCTIONALLY congruent with economic class and age. So, I would definately support profiling poor young males as criminals, not just "Mexicans."
Finally...rape is a much more emotionally charged issue. We can discuss gang violence pretty dispassionately compared to the reactions people have when you talk about rape. I don't really expect people to react logically. For all that, most of the women I know are not fearful of me as a potential rapist or child molester, and when I encounter it, I UNDERSTAND WHY THEY FEEL THAT WAY, so I don't take it personally.
Capisce?
I'm a little confused...not to make you responsible for this argument, but...
...Not to mention to accurately depict them, rather than frame one side as a bunch of pussies and the other as a bunch of armed sociopaths.
We have one faction here who says, basically, 911 is a joke so I'm going to live in a fortress community and when I'm not there, I and my family, including newborns, will be packing. We will drop anyone who acts remotely threatening.
Then we have the faction who says, you are macho idiots for saying that, and cowards to boot.
We need some common sense to navigate between these!
I agree with you that the cops are not the sole guardians of society. So what exactly do you propose be put into practice?
Right now I'm living in Germany. They have taken some non-police steps to reduce the incidence of rape and assault on women (since some majority of assaults are by men upon women). For instance, women get preferential parking in garages--near the door and near the security station, so they don't have to walk late at night through a dark garage alone. There are also phones on the trains that they can use so when they're getting off at a stop late at night, there can be a taxi waiting on them.
What is your opinion of these measures? Is this the sort of thing you mean, or something else?
Unfortunately, Fark headlines aside, the vast majority of child molesters are men and the vast majority of rapists are men. It sucks but it's something we have to put up with...don't blame Dateline for presenting the facts.
Macho bullshit aside, his point remains valid: There are those of us who are never threatened by crime, and then there are those of us who are victimized, for whom the government protection we paid for failed, and typically for whom the government-enforced justice we paid for fails. When you compare crime rates to conviction rates, you see that the vast majority of crimes go unsolved and unpunished.
So what exactly are we paying for? I want the cops out there finding violent criminals and putting rapists behind bars, not harassing kids for skateboarding at the Lincoln Monument.
Once your auto-immune bot is widely distributed, what keeps someone from finding a vulnerability and exploiting to distribute their own bot?
This has been a huge problem with vulnerabilities in anti-virus suites in the past.
But I make ~$150k and I don't even have a bachelor's degree.
Three simple rules:
1) Who you know > what you know.
2) What you've done > what you know.
3) What you know != what classes you have taken, degrees obtained, etc.
No. Then we would simply accuse the Chinese of genetically engineering athletes (or at least socially engineering them, which is for some reason worse in my mind). That's basically what everyone said about Yao Ming, remember?
Basically, they can't win for losing. Here are some examples of what the average Westerner thinks of China and the Chinese:
1. There are a lot of them, and living conditions universally suck (but they don't know it because the Great Firewall won't let them go to those sites)
2. They pretty much read agitprop all day about crushing enemies of the people, or about doing Taiwan a favor and "reunifying" them, or something.
3. Most have jobs staffing assembly lines, gleefully turning out ridiculously unsafe products made of things like pure arsenic or asbestos. This includes food products. All of these products are cheap knockoffs of existing products designed in the West (especially the food products)
4. The rest are goldfarmers or farmers, regular type (i.e., "peasants")
5. The government universally treats its citizens like crap, unless you are some sort of apparatchik (witness: evictions for the Olympics).
The Olympics is China's big chance, on the eve of them becoming a superpower, to dispell all of these ridiculous ideas. So far they are not doing especially well, probably because there is a nugget of truth in all of those outlandish preconceptions. They really need some kind of positive media coverage, especially since we're running out of Jackie Chan.
If they do pull it off, then they look good to the world (which up until now has been ambivalent/suspicious but not as angry as they are with, say, the USA). It would mean that they would have an easier time becoming a superpower and extending their influence. I think their mileage is going to vary, the exposure will be good but they're not going to get away with ANYTHING thanks to the internet.
I've studied them extensively. It's a terrible story. But I also know that the bastard sons and daughters of rape victims, and their children, are treated like shit by Chinese citizens largely because of government propaganda and general social stigma. And I know that there are people growing up in Japan who had nothing to do with the war, and Chinese people growing up who had nothing to do with the war, and I wonder why it's still an issue, other than that it's still being exploited for propaganda purposes.
I think taking down those sites is a bit more justifiable than taking down Save Darfur.
YMMV, however.
This sort of relativism is unproductive. We're just going on circles arguing over which is worse, rather than determining if any actions are simply bad. And both sides are forced into ridiculous positions: America sends people to Gitmo, and the left doesn't like that, so they have to endorse China's human rights abuses instead? And China restricts access to the internet and threatens its neighbors, and conservatives don't like that, so they now HAVE to support sending people to Gitmo?
What the fuck? This is ridiculous. Why can't I simply say that human rights abuses and government censorship are universally bad? What right does some other schmuck have to tell me what positions I HAVE to take? Nothing is getting done.
Yeah, Mao could, but I most of his fighters weren't exactly warrior-poets.
Check out his book on guerilla warfare, he devotes considerable ink to the problem of motivating the peasantry.
No matter how large, complex, or beautiful anything we make is, it is all essentially disposable. We inevitably attach sentiment to things like cars or houses or boats or gigantic cyclotrons but they are just...things.
Look, the Navy has all this romantic imagery associated with plying the seas in deadly warships (read "Choosers of the Slain" by Kipling) but almost all ships end up as razor blades or sunk for target practice. Likewise a lot of us have fun tinkering with computers...but over the past 5 years haven't we all broken down and rebuilt assorted Frankenboxes for this project or that project a hundred times over?
It's the adventure of DOING stuff with the things that is important, not the things themselves. As impressive as the cyclotron is, it's the science and discovery that are really meaningful.
An addendum, just because I think it needs said:
Engineers are fortunate to have jobs that are congruent with their passions in life, but most artists are not. I know plenty of fine arts majors who work some job peripherally connected to their major (graphic design, advertising, etc.) so they can eat and pay the bills and pursue their actual passion.
For them it's not about "getting a job" to the same extent as it is for an engineer.
I disagree. The usefulness of trusting the military to a certain extent probably outweighs the usefulness of not trusting them at all. So, I shouldn't see their codes, because them being able to operate without being compromised by foreign agents is a more useful thing than me being able to look over their shoulder all the time.
:)
But I do think that everything should be archived so that when we do have to do some investigation, we can.
Have you got some idea of what a true...I dunno, "open source" form of government would be like? One where anyone could, at any time, waltz into the President's Office and tell him "I'm just going to sit here and read your e-mails for an hour, don't mind me." How would that work? What kind of world would that work in? Could it work now? Sounds like a good submission to Asimov's
I drink at work.
My boss buys us racks of beer and anytime after 3 in the afternoon if you enter our office you will see us with beers out, brainstorming, etc. You will also be offered a beer.
We get some of our best work done this way.
It's like the "so long as you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" argument: the definition of "right" is getting so narrow as to be ridiculous.
To use a networking metaphor...Our model of government is supposed to be one where the government's rights are whitelisted and everything else is by default given to the citizen, but we're moving towards a state where the government is blacklisting OUR actions.
"Right" and "wrong" have, sadly, never had absolute definitions and have proven to be quite malleable in tyrannies past.
Actually, the new internet actually will be a truck you can just dump things into.
That really piques my interest. I looked over my last post and I'd be fascinated to know what you take issue with.