> What the banks did back in 2008 was maybe malicious, unethical, stupid etc.... But not illegal
If I may beg to differ: a great deal of it was in fact illegal. Much of the bank fraud and real estate fraud was based on pyramid schemes, where collections of debt or of real estate were sold off to newer, lower level members of the scheme to harvest profit for higher level members of the scheme, and especially for the top members of the scheme. Other members of the scheme profited from the transaction fees paid by the lower level members: those included the real estate agents who were flipping properties at wildly inflated properties, sold to buyers whose only hope of paying the mortgages was to engage in more and more successful "flips" of the next property.
In my view, there was very little mysterious about the debacle. Related, though somewhat mechanical, abuses led the "Black Monday" in 1987, which was apparently linked to the growth of programmed high speed trading and the almost inevitable positive feedback of such systems creating its own "pyramid scheme" of overvaluation.
I'm afraid that the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 was very much the same sort of fraud based market disaster as the crash of 2008. The act of buying and selling stock, itself, became the primary source of profit and was itself the chosen investment of millions of citizens who were fraudulently misled about its limits and potential.
> Charging infrastructure is expanding exponentially
I'm afraid that all growth curves can seem exponential when they start. There are some very real limits with existing power grids that will come into play if and as such vehicles become commonplace. The normal charging power of a current Tesla vehicle is about 7 kW. According to https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs..., a typical US home in 2015 used about 901 kWh / month. That averages out to a home power consumption of roughly 1.2 kW. Increasing the precentage of electrical vehicle users to any significant level is going to create a _tremendous_ burden on the electrical infrastructure.
A well built, robust, stable system can absorb a few exceptional users without too much difficulty. But it cannot absorb a quintupling of peak consumption without a great deal of re-engineering.
> The "criminal record" stuff is only fro the poor.
It also affects political activists who may wish to speak in the USA or visit to consult with other political activities which the current USA administration dislikes.
This is _exactly_ right. The data is much more valuable to any one vendor of they have it and their competitors do not, especially if it can be used for monopoly control or even fraud.
I'm afraid to say that it's about eating less. Getting to that state in a way one can live with can be difficult, and complex.
> eat as much as I want until satisfied
This is one of the keys. "Being satisfied" can be very awkward to achieve.
> What finally worked for me was switching to a ketogenic diet (high-fat, low-carb)
Please, also note: "ketogenic" means "producing ketones". It does not necessarily mean "high-fat, low carb". It can also mean "high protein, low carb", or simply "low carb, nothing else". I understand that it used to be very common among humans during winter, or outside the local growing seasons.
I'm old enough that risks of Type 2 diabetes are a real concern for my doctor and me. We've discussed it, and he's pointed out for me that Type 2 diabetes is primarily a resistance to insulin. And this resistance increases insulin levels, which triggers hunger and tends to encourage people to gain weight, while the reduced effectiveness of the insulin and raise in blood sugar levels causes lethargy. The result is that weight gain is often a _symptom_ of Type diabetes, not its cause.
It can be difficult to avoid obesity, especially for we wealthy technology people who spend our time in front of keyboards and are reasonably well paid. It's also becoming difficult for our younger colleagues, who spend more time on phones and on Facebook.
> AIDS is only transferred when you fuck someone in the ass or share needles. It is VERY difficult to catch unless you are a stupid drug addict or you like to sodomize other people and not use a condom.
Infected blood supplies from transfusions have been a dangerous vector since the disease first became noticeable anywhere. Unprotected anal sex is risky, at aa rate of roughly 138 of 10,000 acts For ordinary penis/vaginal sex, the rate is roughly 4 out of 10,000 acts. Moher/infant sex, from childbirth itself and from breast feeding, is also not without risk. This is according to http://www.healthline.com/heal...
"VERY difficult" does not mean a zero risk. And the spread among health care workers and their patients was devastating among poorer nations and poorer communities with less access to gloves, gowns, and the tools and human resources to provide good sterile handling of patients for the 10 years between initial infection and the first clear symptoms of the disease.
Who redacted it? And why? Those are important questions..As an interested member of the public, I may disagree with the reason that it "needs to remain secret". From observation, courts operate best when they are completely public. I'm also concerned that "you shouldn't be over thinking" is often a very dangerous policy.
I'm also forced to see this case in terms of FBI history. The FBI has a long history of "turning" witnesses and granting clemency or even prosecutorial immunity for helping turn in the "big fish". Innocent people have repeatedly been convicted of crimes because of this practice, especially defendants who don't have the money or social resources to resist a prosecutor with fraudulent testimony. Worse, such testimony used to indict a second defendant may be "intepreted" or entirely concocted by the FBI agant. The FBI still refuses to electronically record the conversations they have with witnesses during the investigation, relying on the Form 302 submitted by an agent after the interview. This practice is described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... And I'm afraid it _begs_ for fraud.
The article cited three well documented cases of torrent client published malware, not merely one, and all within the same calendar year. That seems a good foundation to mistrust them.
I do that myself. The content is also generally verifiable via GPG checksums. The Linux or open source built bittorrent clients are far safer than the many clickable "download this client" tools that are linked to specific sites for warez and pirated clients. These are not only often poorly written and fragile, but they also installs lot of adware and 'seb speedup' tools that monitor your system and that you were not informed of when installing the client.
Bittorrent has its uses. but many of its clients are quite dangerous and can even be destructive to your systems. If a site requires a customized client, then both the site and the client should be considered unsafe.
> The kill switch is part of wannacry, thus the NSA had no part in it. No one puts kill switches in exploits - that's stupid.
From my personal security work, _of course_ one puts in a kill switch. The ability to disable malware to avoid detection, and re-activate it when the payload needs delivery, is fundamental to many DDOS attacks. Dormancy is a vital aspect of avoiding detection.
Who is the "blacked out" defendant in that indictment? Why is their name blacked out?
It makes me wonder if the other defendant is a juvenile. I'm afraid it's not uncommon for the FBI to arrest a "small fish", to try to get them to turn in a "big fish" for leniency in sentencing. It was very common in their work against, and far too often with and for, organized crime. It's led to them protecting and even supporting smaller criminals in the hope of prosecuting "kingpins", and led to their sheltering of Kevin Mitnick while he continued to commit computer hacking crimes until he fled and had to be tracked down by a far more skilled hacker.
I'm also sad to say that I've seen no constructive computer crime work by the FBI in the last decade. A great deal of smaller scale computer crime is directly referred to them and is never investigated or prosecuted. Cases with political implications, such as the Aaron Swartz attacks on JSTOR and Hillary Clinton's private email server, have been botched beyond belief.
> NEVER remove infrastructure that is benign. The need to remove systems in walls is a fools errand.
In general, this is a good guideline. There are times when you need to clear the old cable due to fire hazards from older wires with flammable coatings that obstruct putting in a proper fireseal between areas of a structure, or when there is a risk of a less careful technician re-activating the old cable unsafely or insecurely. I've done some work in student housing where a vital rule for safety was "do not leave extra wire _anywhere_ that someone might connect to without using a grounded outlet".
The cleanup of obsolete cable is also a good opportunity to label cables and circuit breakers as you identify cables and to apply insulation in wire channels or conduits that can improve climate control. Many old junction boxes are poorly mounted and poorly insulated.
> It's only going to sue if you've already made the facts public,
"Public" isn't usually the problem. "Potential clients" is usually the problem. It's why a frank discussion between the developers and the client is often blocked: the developers do not necessarily know what sales has promised to the client, or whether the client and sales actually mean something else than the "term of art" means for a particular hardware or software tool.
> If they think twice because you successfully blew the whistle on illegal activity, it's because they fear you'll expose their illegal activities as well.
Not necessarily. I'd question the history of an applicant, especially one involved in such a lawsuit. Whistleblowers are not necessarily productive employees, especially if what they whistleblew on is ill founded. Would you consider hiring Leah Rowe, former primary maintainer of Libreboot, after her allegations of gender discrimination against the Free Software Foundation? Her complaints were ill-founded. She clearly has technological skills, but the risk of treading on her sensitivities and causing a workplace tantrum are too large.
Conversely, I'd recommend or hire Edward Snowden in a heartbeat. He struggled legally and ethically, for years, to deal with a horrible criminal situation involving constitutional freedoms and national security. He gathered _evidence_, worked with his superiors to try to resolve the criminal and abusive issues, and only went to the press after those were exhausted and when the rights and safety of millions of people remained at risk.
I agree with almost all of what you said about the threat, and the risk to an employee who reports misbehavior to anyone outside their immediate org chart behing large. Please permit me to point out that misbehavior worth reporting may be illegal, but not criminal. Also reporting it to someone else to _prevent_ a criminal or illegal act helps eliminate the evidence that an illegal act was planned, and can make proving it enough for a judge to say "you cannot punish an employee for reporting your behavior".
I've certainly encountered the issue in job interviews. before my current position. Employees felt unable to tell me details of what it was like to work at specific companies or with specific colleagues, because they felt unable to safely say negative things. Back then, and even today, former colleagues of applicants whom I'm interviewing have felt unable to provide honest references because such clauses in their current contracts prevent them from saying anything negative about their current colleague. Thinking back, I can think of several occasions where I was able to speak with privately, outside of work hours and off of work phone lines or email, where their evaluations were much more honest and saved my company _enormous_ difficulties. I was also careful to verify this word-of-mouth testimony.
> This is a ridiculous argument. The number of words in a document does not indicate how comprehensible that document is.
Or how safe. In many contracts, the devil is in the details. GPL has evolved to a longer license, and explicitly included patents in GPLv3, because various companies and individuals have tried to legally and illegally violate its stated goals. The more explicit license of GPL has helped protect us from monopoly control of media and of data, and is now helping protect developers and computer users from patent abuse.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to retract part of my note. The ReactJS license if fine: it was the patent encumbered RocksDB license, which that was the issue.
RocksDB has already corrected the issue on their end, their new license file is at https://github.com/facebook/ro.... It was corrected a week ago today.
The license would seem reasonable on the face of it, but it is not a standard BSD or other well-established license. The third clause is Facebook specific. It's just the sort of customized and confusing additions that the Open Source Initiative and the Apache projects leadership try to avoid.
It also needs to be very conservative. Household stored medication is often stored in poor conditions of temperature, humidity, or even left out in bright light on a desk shelf. And many medications are sensitive to UV, to humidity, or to warmth. The result of an accidentally mis-stored medication is tragic, so caution is necessary for medication storage.
I agree that the politics and engineering in Heinlein's stories are not robust. They're fiction: they don't have to be robust, but they do need to involve challenges and obstacles for the characters, to explore the engineering, emotional, and political puzzles. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress explored at least half a dozen awkward themes, including political revolution, the role of indentured servitude and political exile in colonial politics, the differences between warfare by bombing and warfare with troops on the ground, international trade, economic fraud used to fund political purposes, the moral issues of educating an evolving AI, alternative family lifestyles under stringent population pressures, frontier justice and libertarian courts, the ability of technically astute people to work around their limited resources both for the Loonies and for their prisoners, and profound power of people who control the information systems to use it for personal or political ends.
With so many powerful themes explored simultaneously, I'm willing to worry less about the astrophysical details.
I'm afraid I gave away my copy of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to a young person who needed to learn a great deal more about the politics of Robert Heinlein and where many engineers of my generation learned much of our politics. The "Loonies", the inhabitants of Luna, had been engaging in just such an attack on Earth in a war of revolution. There was an amazing comment that there was no point in dropping rocks on Cheyenne Mountain anymore, since it was no longer _there_.
The revolutionaries were also broadcasting to Terra the exact coordinates of each rock, carefully avoiding population centers and historic monuments, and giving any remaining inhabitants time to do exactly that: to get out from under them. I took the story to heart as a model for premeditated violence.
Slashdot Mirror
> What the banks did back in 2008 was maybe malicious, unethical, stupid etc.... But not illegal
If I may beg to differ: a great deal of it was in fact illegal. Much of the bank fraud and real estate fraud was based on pyramid schemes, where collections of debt or of real estate were sold off to newer, lower level members of the scheme to harvest profit for higher level members of the scheme, and especially for the top members of the scheme. Other members of the scheme profited from the transaction fees paid by the lower level members: those included the real estate agents who were flipping properties at wildly inflated properties, sold to buyers whose only hope of paying the mortgages was to engage in more and more successful "flips" of the next property.
In my view, there was very little mysterious about the debacle. Related, though somewhat mechanical, abuses led the "Black Monday" in 1987, which was apparently linked to the growth of programmed high speed trading and the almost inevitable positive feedback of such systems creating its own "pyramid scheme" of overvaluation.
I'm afraid that the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 was very much the same sort of fraud based market disaster as the crash of 2008. The act of buying and selling stock, itself, became the primary source of profit and was itself the chosen investment of millions of citizens who were fraudulently misled about its limits and potential.
> Charging infrastructure is expanding exponentially
I'm afraid that all growth curves can seem exponential when they start. There are some very real limits with existing power grids that will come into play if and as such vehicles become commonplace. The normal charging power of a current Tesla vehicle is about 7 kW. According to https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs..., a typical US home in 2015 used about 901 kWh / month. That averages out to a home power consumption of roughly 1.2 kW. Increasing the precentage of electrical vehicle users to any significant level is going to create a _tremendous_ burden on the electrical infrastructure.
A well built, robust, stable system can absorb a few exceptional users without too much difficulty. But it cannot absorb a quintupling of peak consumption without a great deal of re-engineering.
> The "criminal record" stuff is only fro the poor.
It also affects political activists who may wish to speak in the USA or visit to consult with other political activities which the current USA administration dislikes.
This is _exactly_ right. The data is much more valuable to any one vendor of they have it and their competitors do not, especially if it can be used for monopoly control or even fraud.
> It's not about eating less
I'm afraid to say that it's about eating less. Getting to that state in a way one can live with can be difficult, and complex.
> eat as much as I want until satisfied
This is one of the keys. "Being satisfied" can be very awkward to achieve.
> What finally worked for me was switching to a ketogenic diet (high-fat, low-carb)
Please, also note: "ketogenic" means "producing ketones". It does not necessarily mean "high-fat, low carb". It can also mean "high protein, low carb", or simply "low carb, nothing else". I understand that it used to be very common among humans during winter, or outside the local growing seasons.
I'm old enough that risks of Type 2 diabetes are a real concern for my doctor and me. We've discussed it, and he's pointed out for me that Type 2 diabetes is primarily a resistance to insulin. And this resistance increases insulin levels, which triggers hunger and tends to encourage people to gain weight, while the reduced effectiveness of the insulin and raise in blood sugar levels causes lethargy. The result is that weight gain is often a _symptom_ of Type diabetes, not its cause.
It can be difficult to avoid obesity, especially for we wealthy technology people who spend our time in front of keyboards and are reasonably well paid. It's also becoming difficult for our younger colleagues, who spend more time on phones and on Facebook.
> AIDS is only transferred when you fuck someone in the ass or share needles. It is VERY difficult to catch unless you are a stupid drug addict or you like to sodomize other people and not use a condom.
Infected blood supplies from transfusions have been a dangerous vector since the disease first became noticeable anywhere. Unprotected anal sex is risky, at aa rate of roughly 138 of 10,000 acts For ordinary penis/vaginal sex, the rate is roughly 4 out of 10,000 acts. Moher/infant sex, from childbirth itself and from breast feeding, is also not without risk. This is according to http://www.healthline.com/heal...
"VERY difficult" does not mean a zero risk. And the spread among health care workers and their patients was devastating among poorer nations and poorer communities with less access to gloves, gowns, and the tools and human resources to provide good sterile handling of patients for the 10 years between initial infection and the first clear symptoms of the disease.
Who redacted it? And why? Those are important questions..As an interested member of the public, I may disagree with the reason that it "needs to remain secret". From observation, courts operate best when they are completely public. I'm also concerned that "you shouldn't be over thinking" is often a very dangerous policy.
I'm also forced to see this case in terms of FBI history. The FBI has a long history of "turning" witnesses and granting clemency or even prosecutorial immunity for helping turn in the "big fish". Innocent people have repeatedly been convicted of crimes because of this practice, especially defendants who don't have the money or social resources to resist a prosecutor with fraudulent testimony. Worse, such testimony used to indict a second defendant may be "intepreted" or entirely concocted by the FBI agant. The FBI still refuses to electronically record the conversations they have with witnesses during the investigation, relying on the Form 302 submitted by an agent after the interview. This practice is described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... And I'm afraid it _begs_ for fraud.
The article cited three well documented cases of torrent client published malware, not merely one, and all within the same calendar year. That seems a good foundation to mistrust them.
I do that myself. The content is also generally verifiable via GPG checksums. The Linux or open source built bittorrent clients are far safer than the many clickable "download this client" tools that are linked to specific sites for warez and pirated clients. These are not only often poorly written and fragile, but they also installs lot of adware and 'seb speedup' tools that monitor your system and that you were not informed of when installing the client.
Bittorrent has its uses. but many of its clients are quite dangerous and can even be destructive to your systems. If a site requires a customized client, then both the site and the client should be considered unsafe.
> The kill switch is part of wannacry, thus the NSA had no part in it. No one puts kill switches in exploits - that's stupid.
From my personal security work, _of course_ one puts in a kill switch. The ability to disable malware to avoid detection, and re-activate it when the payload needs delivery, is fundamental to many DDOS attacks. Dormancy is a vital aspect of avoiding detection.
Who is the "blacked out" defendant in that indictment? Why is their name blacked out?
It makes me wonder if the other defendant is a juvenile. I'm afraid it's not uncommon for the FBI to arrest a "small fish", to try to get them to turn in a "big fish" for leniency in sentencing. It was very common in their work against, and far too often with and for, organized crime. It's led to them protecting and even supporting smaller criminals in the hope of prosecuting "kingpins", and led to their sheltering of Kevin Mitnick while he continued to commit computer hacking crimes until he fled and had to be tracked down by a far more skilled hacker.
I'm also sad to say that I've seen no constructive computer crime work by the FBI in the last decade. A great deal of smaller scale computer crime is directly referred to them and is never investigated or prosecuted. Cases with political implications, such as the Aaron Swartz attacks on JSTOR and Hillary Clinton's private email server, have been botched beyond belief.
> day time soap opera for broad, more accurately female appeal,
May I congratulate you on the number of levels in that comment? It caught my eye.
> 1. S&M. Coax makes for great bondage or whipping.
The connectors would seem to be a bit painful. I have, however, seen the "cat5 of nine tails". There are images at https://www.google.com/search?...
> NEVER remove infrastructure that is benign. The need to remove systems in walls is a fools errand.
In general, this is a good guideline. There are times when you need to clear the old cable due to fire hazards from older wires with flammable coatings that obstruct putting in a proper fireseal between areas of a structure, or when there is a risk of a less careful technician re-activating the old cable unsafely or insecurely. I've done some work in student housing where a vital rule for safety was "do not leave extra wire _anywhere_ that someone might connect to without using a grounded outlet".
The cleanup of obsolete cable is also a good opportunity to label cables and circuit breakers as you identify cables and to apply insulation in wire channels or conduits that can improve climate control. Many old junction boxes are poorly mounted and poorly insulated.
> It's only going to sue if you've already made the facts public,
"Public" isn't usually the problem. "Potential clients" is usually the problem. It's why a frank discussion between the developers and the client is often blocked: the developers do not necessarily know what sales has promised to the client, or whether the client and sales actually mean something else than the "term of art" means for a particular hardware or software tool.
> If they think twice because you successfully blew the whistle on illegal activity, it's because they fear you'll expose their illegal activities as well.
Not necessarily. I'd question the history of an applicant, especially one involved in such a lawsuit. Whistleblowers are not necessarily productive employees, especially if what they whistleblew on is ill founded. Would you consider hiring Leah Rowe, former primary maintainer of Libreboot, after her allegations of gender discrimination against the Free Software Foundation? Her complaints were ill-founded. She clearly has technological skills, but the risk of treading on her sensitivities and causing a workplace tantrum are too large.
Conversely, I'd recommend or hire Edward Snowden in a heartbeat. He struggled legally and ethically, for years, to deal with a horrible criminal situation involving constitutional freedoms and national security. He gathered _evidence_, worked with his superiors to try to resolve the criminal and abusive issues, and only went to the press after those were exhausted and when the rights and safety of millions of people remained at risk.
I agree with almost all of what you said about the threat, and the risk to an employee who reports misbehavior to anyone outside their immediate org chart behing large. Please permit me to point out that misbehavior worth reporting may be illegal, but not criminal. Also reporting it to someone else to _prevent_ a criminal or illegal act helps eliminate the evidence that an illegal act was planned, and can make proving it enough for a judge to say "you cannot punish an employee for reporting your behavior".
I've certainly encountered the issue in job interviews. before my current position. Employees felt unable to tell me details of what it was like to work at specific companies or with specific colleagues, because they felt unable to safely say negative things. Back then, and even today, former colleagues of applicants whom I'm interviewing have felt unable to provide honest references because such clauses in their current contracts prevent them from saying anything negative about their current colleague. Thinking back, I can think of several occasions where I was able to speak with privately, outside of work hours and off of work phone lines or email, where their evaluations were much more honest and saved my company _enormous_ difficulties. I was also careful to verify this word-of-mouth testimony.
> This is a ridiculous argument. The number of words in a document does not indicate how comprehensible that document is.
Or how safe. In many contracts, the devil is in the details. GPL has evolved to a longer license, and explicitly included patents in GPLv3, because various companies and individuals have tried to legally and illegally violate its stated goals. The more explicit license of GPL has helped protect us from monopoly control of media and of data, and is now helping protect developers and computer users from patent abuse.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to retract part of my note. The ReactJS license if fine: it was the patent encumbered RocksDB license, which that was the issue.
RocksDB has already corrected the issue on their end, their new license file is at https://github.com/facebook/ro.... It was corrected a week ago today.
The actual license is at https://github.com/facebook/re... .
The license would seem reasonable on the face of it, but it is not a standard BSD or other well-established license. The third clause is Facebook specific. It's just the sort of customized and confusing additions that the Open Source Initiative and the Apache projects leadership try to avoid.
It also needs to be very conservative. Household stored medication is often stored in poor conditions of temperature, humidity, or even left out in bright light on a desk shelf. And many medications are sensitive to UV, to humidity, or to warmth. The result of an accidentally mis-stored medication is tragic, so caution is necessary for medication storage.
> To the people who think carrying cash is dangerous: cash never fails to complete a transaction
For machine transactions, it often fails due to failure of the cash mechanism.
I agree that the politics and engineering in Heinlein's stories are not robust. They're fiction: they don't have to be robust, but they do need to involve challenges and obstacles for the characters, to explore the engineering, emotional, and political puzzles. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress explored at least half a dozen awkward themes, including political revolution, the role of indentured servitude and political exile in colonial politics, the differences between warfare by bombing and warfare with troops on the ground, international trade, economic fraud used to fund political purposes, the moral issues of educating an evolving AI, alternative family lifestyles under stringent population pressures, frontier justice and libertarian courts, the ability of technically astute people to work around their limited resources both for the Loonies and for their prisoners, and profound power of people who control the information systems to use it for personal or political ends.
With so many powerful themes explored simultaneously, I'm willing to worry less about the astrophysical details.
I'm afraid I gave away my copy of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to a young person who needed to learn a great deal more about the politics of Robert Heinlein and where many engineers of my generation learned much of our politics. The "Loonies", the inhabitants of Luna, had been engaging in just such an attack on Earth in a war of revolution. There was an amazing comment that there was no point in dropping rocks on Cheyenne Mountain anymore, since it was no longer _there_.
The revolutionaries were also broadcasting to Terra the exact coordinates of each rock, carefully avoiding population centers and historic monuments, and giving any remaining inhabitants time to do exactly that: to get out from under them. I took the story to heart as a model for premeditated violence.