o Please stop supporting paywalled sites. o Please stop supporting sites with closed comment sections.
These things are bad for the web and the web's denizens -- of course not for the ethically crippled sites themselves, as we are their product, and both payment up and dissent down are multipliers to their bread and butter.
The paywalled sites are monetizing the news, and that almost always makes for biased reporting.
The closed comment sections make for echo chambers, and that creates an environment where fake news and agitprop flourish.
Same thing to my fellow slashdotters: if you support bad actors in bad behaviors, they will naturally persist. So think about that before you click through the next time someone thrusts a paywalled or comment-bereft site in your face.
It means that we are now far more removed from access to the metal to even do a lot of the optimizations that we've done in the past.
Well... no, it means that you are, perhaps. Some of us still write in c or c++, and keep our attention on the details. You can tell you've run into one of us when the many-functioned app you get is a couple megabytes instead of 50, runs faster than the fat ones, and doesn't suffer from black-box bugs inherited from OPC.
I always thought that the user's CPU cycles and memory were things a developer was obligated to treat as the user's valued resource, and so not things to waste.
I know, totally out of date thinking. It's ok, I'm old, I'll die soon.:)
Yes. But more importantly, I can program in 6809 machine code. Including building all the index modes. Which, back in the day, is one of the things that saved me from having to design in, and then program, CPUs like the 6502 and z80, both of which are seriously anemic by comparison. But I prefer to program in assembler. Because I'm sane.
My affection for the 6809 ran so deep that I wrote the 6809 emulator you'll find here, which required me to implement the entire instruction set from the ground up.
But yeah, I can write machine code for about 10 microprocessors. And you know what? In the day... that was useful. I could read (E)(P)ROM dumps, I could cold-patch... but today, I just wish I could get the brain cells back.:)
There's just too much volume to track all the content everywhere.
There are 350 million people in the USA, more or less. Including kids not of age to use computers. One computer, just one, operates at billions of instructions per second (when the code is written in anything efficient, like c.) The NSA has a newish huge data center located on the main trunks.
You do the math. If you still think they can't sieve that amount of data effectively, why then, good on you for your optimism.:)
They are not allowed to hack my computer even IF THEY HAVE A WARRANT, because no warrant can be granted for a computer on foreign soil.
I think what our courts would (eventually) say is that the constitution doesn't protect anyone, or anything, outside of the USA itself, and so no warrant is required in the first place.
That's pretty much the entire basis our CIA was built upon.
I'm not saying this is a good outlook; but I am saying it is the outlook.
I have canceled more things than I've submitted for that exact reason.
They could have read it right off your keyboard anyway. By far the easiest place to monitor communications is at the unencrypted endpoints. If you don't want anyone to know what you're thinking, don't say it, don't enter it into a computer in any form, and don't write it down. That'll protect you. For at least a little while longer, anyway.
"Two people can keep a secret -- if one of them is dead."
The Inquisition killed about 3,000 people over the course of 350 years.
"The inquisition" comprises a combined series of undertakings beginning with Pope Lucius III's instigation in 1184 CE and terminating in 1834 CE - a span of about 650 years. The Spanish Inquisition was one chapter of this, but by no means can be reasonably considered an isolated or peak event.
Historically speaking, Christianity, between the inquisitions, the crusades, the pograms, blood libel, and just general oppression of various and sundry kinds, has a great deal of theism-based violence to answer for.
If you just have to punch a name into a computer and its suddenly all in front of you though, it becomes second nature to just dig into anyone you feel like -- whether or not you have legal justification for doing so. Time and money are gone from the equation.
Without going into detail, speaking as an engineer, one signal... many signals... the distinction is not a serious technical obstacle, other than money, which, again, not a serious obstacle to the state. Do you really believe this type of tech was only used 1:1?
The feds monitor emissions from vans, from aircraft, in vehicles, and from orbit. If they want you, they already have you. I write very high end signal processing software. I assure you this has been going on for decades. We just have better computers now. They have always had the best computers money could buy, so where we are today, they were some time ago.
A high-quality microphone that is always listening and voice recognition are useful right up to the point where they are used against you.
Oh, you mean that smartphone you've been carrying in your pocket for years now? That high quality microphone? That voice-recognition? That always-on connection to the world?
The Echo and Amazon brethren are the least of our problems here. Also, as currently implemented, these devices recognize their names locally, and then talks to the world. I have watched the network traffic quite carefully -- that's how it works. For now, anyway.
I'm considerably more concerned with the smartphones. They're much more powerful, and the concern I have isn't so much what a corporation might do with my speech (try to sell me somehting?), but what the government might do with it. Because generally, a corporation can dangle temptation, but a government can do you direct and consequential harm.
That's the problem with this. It's only useful if you put your eggs in one basket
Nope. Amazon is perfectly agreeable with you downloading the music you buy as well as making it available for you to stream via the dot and sister devices. They make it trivially easy.
You can do whatever you like with your music as purchased from Amazon. I download everything I buy. There's even a bulk-download capability. it's awesome.
If you know of a crime, why would you not report it?
Because "crime" is not an adequate discriminator for "bad."
Just a few obvious examples over time: Helping a slave escape from slavery was a crime. Using a fountain while being black was a crime. Having various types of wholly consensual and informed sex has been a crime. Using various drugs is a crime. Going naked in public is often a crime. There are many more examples like these.
None of which rise to the level of "bad", except inasmuch as they demonstrate the government is bad.
And that is why if you know of a crime, if you are a decent human being, you would definitely not report it.
Look, I know my browsing will be in a huge database that nobody will look at it.
The problem is not correctly posed as "nobody will look at it." This isn't a people problem.
What "looks at it" is computer systems, programmed to look at it. What a human would consider "lost in a sea of data", a computer will have no trouble finding, characterizing, and reporting back as "this is the data you were looking for" to any interested inquiry, perfectly formatted for immediate use / subsequent action.
So the day they make your particular fetish or recreational substance / entertainment / political stance / religion / etc. a crime, that data will immediately identify you as a vulnerable citizen. Now it comes down to what use can be made of you. Porn sweep to impress the mommies? A little pressure to get you to do X or Y? Filling the need for unpaid slave labor in prison factories? Soylent green? (I hate that damned movie, but...)
In the US, the constitution explicitly forbids -- both to the federal government and that of the states -- going back in time and making crimes out of actions that were not crimes at the time, or increasing punishment along the same lines. These are the "ex post facto" provisions. In recent decades, a spate of such laws have been crafted and put into broad use, treating the constitutional prohibitions as irrelevant. Generally the mechanism used has been sophistry ("You absolutely will not sell hamburgers"... "Why, that's not a hamburger! That's a ground beef sandwich!"... "Okay then, carry on.") and pandering to intentionally crafted, hysteria-induced mommy fear (Terrorists! Drugs! Think of the children!), which is often spiced with not-very-subtle appeals to jingoism, superstition, and classist notions.
Unless the citizens can control the government, a capability US citizens no longer have, this kind of cancerous spreading of unauthorized and forbidden exercise of power is very likely. Your data stashed in some database today renders you vulnerable to any part or parcel of perfidy by any state actor. The only sure way to prevent this is to keep your data out of these databases in the first place. And it looks like you've forfeited that option. Sorry.
I don't think you understand that what Franklin meant one way, we can mean entirely another -- both can be sincere, and both uses are entirely appropriate. Nothing is lost by attributing the quote, either.
The stance that personal liberty and immunity from government oversight of personal and consensual activities is a good thing, and that trading these off for (generally the illusion of, but very occasionally the actuality of) safety is an act so vile that it renders the trader unworthy of those liberties and immunity, is a very well established one. Franklin's words then fit such an outlook today very well, regardless of what he intended them to mean at the time.
Words are like that. When we aren't talking about law, words are tools to be used as we see fit. As they should be.
Those high-energy electron guns... very handy for surveillance of any part of the masses one chooses, as it turned out. Of course there were many other mechanisms in play at the time.
Today, a computer running linux, OS X, or Windows connected to the Internet is far better. It's like DVDA for your data. Leaves your data-legs split open like a thanksgiving turkey. They don't need to compromise you carrying the turkey around, either. They're sitting right at your dinner table with you.
They'll just raise your taxes and buy more computing power with your money if they need to. But they probably won't need to.
In the contest between armor and weapons, armor always ends up losing. In this case, you have to recognize that at both ends of the communication, the information is unencrypted. Consequently, if they want you, and you have hardened the communication using encryption, they probably won't even try to compromise the communication. They'll compromise one or more of the computers at the endpoints of the communication. Unless your computer is running your own custom operating system, there isn't anything you can do to stop them short of disconnecting from the communications networks, which kind of puts a damper on your communications capabilities and so is actually a rather obvious form of footgun in that regard.
The right answer is to get the opposition to stop shooting at you.
In this case, the right answer is to get the government out of the business of tracking the citizen's locations, finances, business, and communications.
If that can't be accomplished, then the citizens lose. Period.
The situation here in the USA is dire. The politicians have actually convinced people that it's a good thing that they monitor their banking, their business, their communications, their location, etc. The politicians created and used many forms of hugely-blown-out-of-proportion hysterical narratives to get that accomplished. Today, the average citizen is an Orwellian-class dupe. There's no sign at all that this is going to change.
Security today depends on never sharing anything with anyone. Outside of that, you either are already, or can be at any time, compromised by state agents fully empowered to do so. Not authorized, mind you -- this is exercise of arrogated power I'm describing -- but that no longer matters, which is another severe problem we have been presented with.
You completely misunderstand how things actually work. A few kids out of 350 million people get shot by some crazy idiot who should never have been on the streets, "we need new gun laws"; one child gets run over, "we need to replace drivers"; a few aircraft are found to have vulnerable cockpits, and no one can ever get on a plane again without ridiculous, expensive security theater (as opposed to actually solving the problem by hardening the cockpits, a one-time cost that doesn't screw your liberties over.) Etc.
Laws aren't a product of sane, reasonable thinking due to science and statistics. Laws are all about pandering, and pandering depends on getting the mommies to feel protective. All it takes is a corporate agenda -- some profit-making scheme -- to push the legislators where they need to go.
Basically, for love of money and re-election, congress creates panics to push a particular corporate agenda; that works, and the corporations get their way, the congresscritters get re-elected, and all is well with the world. From their lofty perspective, anyway.
Only for a limited number of consoles for a limited period of time.
Come on. First of all, the PS2 was the best selling console ever, with your "limited number" being over 155 million consoles sold. The PS3 "fat" sold many millions more.
Seems to me that you're intentionally minimizing an extremely significant number of consoles. Any number is "limited"; but 150+ million consoles is significant.
Slashdot Mirror
What I "cherry-picked" was 70% of the population.
The whole point -- which you completely missed -- was that 70% of the people are not doing well.
But don't worry, you're in considerable company.
The average income of 10th through 70th percentile - in other words, most citizens - is $32,245 / year (source, EPI Data Library - Wages by percentile.csv, 2015 [latest] row).
Over 40 million (out of 319 million, or about 12%) of US citizens are going hungry (feedingamerica.org).
The social safety net isn't safe, nor particularly social.
I'm sure we can expect relief from the Trump administration (cough... choke.)
But hey, let's worry about tech interns. My blinders need a workout anyway.
Slashdot Editors / owners / etc.:
o Please stop supporting paywalled sites.
o Please stop supporting sites with closed comment sections.
These things are bad for the web and the web's denizens -- of course not for the ethically crippled sites themselves, as we are their product, and both payment up and dissent down are multipliers to their bread and butter.
The paywalled sites are monetizing the news, and that almost always makes for biased reporting.
The closed comment sections make for echo chambers, and that creates an environment where fake news and agitprop flourish.
Same thing to my fellow slashdotters: if you support bad actors in bad behaviors, they will naturally persist. So think about that before you click through the next time someone thrusts a paywalled or comment-bereft site in your face.
Thanks for reading.
Well... no, it means that you are, perhaps. Some of us still write in c or c++, and keep our attention on the details. You can tell you've run into one of us when the many-functioned app you get is a couple megabytes instead of 50, runs faster than the fat ones, and doesn't suffer from black-box bugs inherited from OPC.
I always thought that the user's CPU cycles and memory were things a developer was obligated to treat as the user's valued resource, and so not things to waste.
I know, totally out of date thinking. It's ok, I'm old, I'll die soon. :)
Yes. But more importantly, I can program in 6809 machine code. Including building all the index modes. Which, back in the day, is one of the things that saved me from having to design in, and then program, CPUs like the 6502 and z80, both of which are seriously anemic by comparison. But I prefer to program in assembler. Because I'm sane.
My affection for the 6809 ran so deep that I wrote the 6809 emulator you'll find here, which required me to implement the entire instruction set from the ground up.
But yeah, I can write machine code for about 10 microprocessors. And you know what? In the day... that was useful. I could read (E)(P)ROM dumps, I could cold-patch... but today, I just wish I could get the brain cells back. :)
You're just nybbling away at the parent's ego now.
What is needed is a not-very expensive device that can be put into the home that prints high quality metal parts, plastics, ceramics and electronics.
FTFY
There are 350 million people in the USA, more or less. Including kids not of age to use computers. One computer, just one, operates at billions of instructions per second (when the code is written in anything efficient, like c.) The NSA has a newish huge data center located on the main trunks.
You do the math. If you still think they can't sieve that amount of data effectively, why then, good on you for your optimism. :)
Trump is assumed by some to have won based on (anticipated) EC votes. However, three facts:
1 - The EC hasn't voted yet.
2 - The EC does not have to vote for Trump.
3 - Clinton got (a lot) more votes from, you know, the people.
Trump may well end up to be president. But he isn't the president yet; he isn't even the president-elect yet.
I think what our courts would (eventually) say is that the constitution doesn't protect anyone, or anything, outside of the USA itself, and so no warrant is required in the first place.
That's pretty much the entire basis our CIA was built upon.
I'm not saying this is a good outlook; but I am saying it is the outlook.
Arguments of the form:
A's assertion: "Joe never kicked the dog"
B's response: "Larry did so kick the dog!"
They could have read it right off your keyboard anyway. By far the easiest place to monitor communications is at the unencrypted endpoints. If you don't want anyone to know what you're thinking, don't say it, don't enter it into a computer in any form, and don't write it down. That'll protect you. For at least a little while longer, anyway.
"Two people can keep a secret -- if one of them is dead."
"The inquisition" comprises a combined series of undertakings beginning with Pope Lucius III's instigation in 1184 CE and terminating in 1834 CE - a span of about 650 years. The Spanish Inquisition was one chapter of this, but by no means can be reasonably considered an isolated or peak event.
Perhaps you'll find this of interest.
Historically speaking, Christianity, between the inquisitions, the crusades, the pograms, blood libel, and just general oppression of various and sundry kinds, has a great deal of theism-based violence to answer for.
None so blind as those who will not see.
--John Heywood, 1546 CE
That's a lot of words to say "Google" :)
Without going into detail, speaking as an engineer, one signal... many signals... the distinction is not a serious technical obstacle, other than money, which, again, not a serious obstacle to the state. Do you really believe this type of tech was only used 1:1?
The feds monitor emissions from vans, from aircraft, in vehicles, and from orbit. If they want you, they already have you. I write very high end signal processing software. I assure you this has been going on for decades. We just have better computers now. They have always had the best computers money could buy, so where we are today, they were some time ago.
It's just the way it is.
Oh, you mean that smartphone you've been carrying in your pocket for years now? That high quality microphone? That voice-recognition? That always-on connection to the world?
The Echo and Amazon brethren are the least of our problems here. Also, as currently implemented, these devices recognize their names locally, and then talks to the world. I have watched the network traffic quite carefully -- that's how it works. For now, anyway.
I'm considerably more concerned with the smartphones. They're much more powerful, and the concern I have isn't so much what a corporation might do with my speech (try to sell me somehting?), but what the government might do with it. Because generally, a corporation can dangle temptation, but a government can do you direct and consequential harm.
Nope. Amazon is perfectly agreeable with you downloading the music you buy as well as making it available for you to stream via the dot and sister devices. They make it trivially easy.
You can do whatever you like with your music as purchased from Amazon. I download everything I buy. There's even a bulk-download capability. it's awesome.
Because "crime" is not an adequate discriminator for "bad."
Just a few obvious examples over time: Helping a slave escape from slavery was a crime. Using a fountain while being black was a crime. Having various types of wholly consensual and informed sex has been a crime. Using various drugs is a crime. Going naked in public is often a crime. There are many more examples like these.
None of which rise to the level of "bad", except inasmuch as they demonstrate the government is bad.
And that is why if you know of a crime, if you are a decent human being, you would definitely not report it.
The problem is not correctly posed as "nobody will look at it." This isn't a people problem.
What "looks at it" is computer systems, programmed to look at it. What a human would consider "lost in a sea of data", a computer will have no trouble finding, characterizing, and reporting back as "this is the data you were looking for" to any interested inquiry, perfectly formatted for immediate use / subsequent action.
So the day they make your particular fetish or recreational substance / entertainment / political stance / religion / etc. a crime, that data will immediately identify you as a vulnerable citizen. Now it comes down to what use can be made of you. Porn sweep to impress the mommies? A little pressure to get you to do X or Y? Filling the need for unpaid slave labor in prison factories? Soylent green? (I hate that damned movie, but...)
In the US, the constitution explicitly forbids -- both to the federal government and that of the states -- going back in time and making crimes out of actions that were not crimes at the time, or increasing punishment along the same lines. These are the "ex post facto" provisions. In recent decades, a spate of such laws have been crafted and put into broad use, treating the constitutional prohibitions as irrelevant. Generally the mechanism used has been sophistry ("You absolutely will not sell hamburgers" ... "Why, that's not a hamburger! That's a ground beef sandwich!" ... "Okay then, carry on.") and pandering to intentionally crafted, hysteria-induced mommy fear (Terrorists! Drugs! Think of the children!), which is often spiced with not-very-subtle appeals to jingoism, superstition, and classist notions.
Unless the citizens can control the government, a capability US citizens no longer have, this kind of cancerous spreading of unauthorized and forbidden exercise of power is very likely. Your data stashed in some database today renders you vulnerable to any part or parcel of perfidy by any state actor. The only sure way to prevent this is to keep your data out of these databases in the first place. And it looks like you've forfeited that option. Sorry.
I don't think you understand that what Franklin meant one way, we can mean entirely another -- both can be sincere, and both uses are entirely appropriate. Nothing is lost by attributing the quote, either.
The stance that personal liberty and immunity from government oversight of personal and consensual activities is a good thing, and that trading these off for (generally the illusion of, but very occasionally the actuality of) safety is an act so vile that it renders the trader unworthy of those liberties and immunity, is a very well established one. Franklin's words then fit such an outlook today very well, regardless of what he intended them to mean at the time.
Words are like that. When we aren't talking about law, words are tools to be used as we see fit. As they should be.
On the contrary. Tempest
Those high-energy electron guns... very handy for surveillance of any part of the masses one chooses, as it turned out. Of course there were many other mechanisms in play at the time.
Today, a computer running linux, OS X, or Windows connected to the Internet is far better. It's like DVDA for your data. Leaves your data-legs split open like a thanksgiving turkey. They don't need to compromise you carrying the turkey around, either. They're sitting right at your dinner table with you.
They'll just raise your taxes and buy more computing power with your money if they need to. But they probably won't need to.
In the contest between armor and weapons, armor always ends up losing. In this case, you have to recognize that at both ends of the communication, the information is unencrypted. Consequently, if they want you, and you have hardened the communication using encryption, they probably won't even try to compromise the communication. They'll compromise one or more of the computers at the endpoints of the communication. Unless your computer is running your own custom operating system, there isn't anything you can do to stop them short of disconnecting from the communications networks, which kind of puts a damper on your communications capabilities and so is actually a rather obvious form of footgun in that regard.
The right answer is to get the opposition to stop shooting at you.
In this case, the right answer is to get the government out of the business of tracking the citizen's locations, finances, business, and communications.
If that can't be accomplished, then the citizens lose. Period.
The situation here in the USA is dire. The politicians have actually convinced people that it's a good thing that they monitor their banking, their business, their communications, their location, etc. The politicians created and used many forms of hugely-blown-out-of-proportion hysterical narratives to get that accomplished. Today, the average citizen is an Orwellian-class dupe. There's no sign at all that this is going to change.
Security today depends on never sharing anything with anyone. Outside of that, you either are already, or can be at any time, compromised by state agents fully empowered to do so. Not authorized, mind you -- this is exercise of arrogated power I'm describing -- but that no longer matters, which is another severe problem we have been presented with.
And on that cheerful note... :)
You completely misunderstand how things actually work. A few kids out of 350 million people get shot by some crazy idiot who should never have been on the streets, "we need new gun laws"; one child gets run over, "we need to replace drivers"; a few aircraft are found to have vulnerable cockpits, and no one can ever get on a plane again without ridiculous, expensive security theater (as opposed to actually solving the problem by hardening the cockpits, a one-time cost that doesn't screw your liberties over.) Etc.
Laws aren't a product of sane, reasonable thinking due to science and statistics. Laws are all about pandering, and pandering depends on getting the mommies to feel protective. All it takes is a corporate agenda -- some profit-making scheme -- to push the legislators where they need to go.
Basically, for love of money and re-election, congress creates panics to push a particular corporate agenda; that works, and the corporations get their way, the congresscritters get re-elected, and all is well with the world. From their lofty perspective, anyway.
Come on. First of all, the PS2 was the best selling console ever, with your "limited number" being over 155 million consoles sold. The PS3 "fat" sold many millions more.
Seems to me that you're intentionally minimizing an extremely significant number of consoles. Any number is "limited"; but 150+ million consoles is significant.