Is this an attempt at trolling, or demonstrating how poor your reading comprehension skills are? To be very clear, this is not how things are, but how they should be in concept.
My wife does 100% of her work as a writer on her Chromebook and various Android devices.
If you would have stuck with just claiming that she worked on a Chromebook, I may believe you. While not "great" in terms of anything, it's at least possible. A Chromebook is like laptop. Of course with poorer performance, crappy graphics, and limited software available.
I have no idea why you would toss out the claim of Android, are you getting paid to shill? Kind of like someone claiming "My wife does 100% of her work a Macbook and iphone/ipad.". Obviously the majority of the work is on the Macbook, and "yes" I would ask them the same question.
Zoning for the infrastructure is the smallest part of the problem and the easiest to solve. It does however require thinking differently. To be very clear, this is not how things are, but how they should be in concept. Additional comments at the end of this post are not directed at you, please take no offense (I try to warn trolls away).
The Government is not supposed to "own" any land. They are supposed to work with the citizens to zone it properly, but the citizens own the land because the Government is the people (that's the theory at any rate). Since the Government does not own land, they can't lease or rent it out. They can only enforce the zoning that the people agree to.
If that theory was the practice, you and I could both own ISPs and lay our own cables/wires in the zones we are allotted. If the government gives us 1/2" to work in and share, the Government failed to zone properly. You and I should ensure that we don't muck with each others cables when laying things out, and the Government's job is to ensure I am liable if I damage your stuff and visa versa. "Leasing" us space on land they don't own is impossible.
This puts more accountability at a lower level, and that's how it should be. It reduces the footprint for potential corruption, and again that's how it should be.
I'm not anti-government by any means. I believe that some Government is required for society to function and thrive. Government should be a very minimal part of our lives in my opinion, but necessary.
Someone may comment and claim "but water", or "but power lines" and my answer will be the same. The problems we see today are due to both corruption and business not being held accountable for wrong doing. People want to claim that the Government is protecting them, but look at how many monopolies we have today. Look how many accidents there are with this alleged protection (Bruno CA). We have seen costs increase drastically on basic services because of monopolization, and QOS go down the toilet. The fact is that while Government has increased massively in the last decade everything in the private sector has gotten worse, so more government can not be the answer.
Now we need the quasi-obligatory response that this is really a government problem, and if government weren't in there mucking about with needless regulation the free market would address the problem and we'd all be in broadband utopia at reasonable prices.
Perhaps I don't quite understand your wording and this is not double speak, but assuming you wrote correctly this is a Government problem. At least in the realm of what the Governments role is supposed to be in a Capitalist economy.
The majority of monopolization in the US is due exactly to monopolization by Government intervention. You may have to go deep to see it, and many people don't want to look that far, but it's all there. Start with Patent law and work your way out. Even if I could provide a better cheaper solution I could not implement it because I'd be stopped by the Government due to violating someone's patent.
And lets not bullshit each other, the majority of the millions of patents (I'd say 99.9%) approved every year do not deal with actual inventions, but ideas that someone now owns. Many of these are never implemented, because it would harm the patent owners market share and profit margins.
As I started with, it's possible that your statement is just worded in an obscure fashion and you would agree that this problem is due to the government.
I'm not short sighted, I'm a realist. There is currently no profit to be had by trying to colonize the moon, Mars, mine Asteroids, or anything else in space. Rumors have said that rare minerals may exist in these places, but this lacks evidence.
Don't confuse that with claiming it's impossible, just that lacking evidence it's cheaper to sit here and cause trouble to increase wealth (which we see on massive scale) than it is to explore space and find giant diamonds and asteroids full of gold. If we had more evidence things may be different.
I'm not sure if that is a threat or a movie quote. If it's a threat, I am only frightened by your lack of grammatical skills. The "echelons you talked about" do and the rest of what you state is jibberish. Care to make another attempt in English?
Were we not just told a few months ago by NASA that colonizing Mars would be impossible due to moral issues? I'm too lazy at the moment to go dig this up, be my guest.
I'm all for this, but don't see anyone actually spending the money required to colonize anything. In a profit driven society where the greater good equates to "my phat wallet" it won't happen. At least not while the majority of money in the world is in the hands of about 2 dozen families.
So people that shit on others, circumvent and break the law, and basically shit on people at every possible opportunity to make personal gains are to be looked up to when they toss a crumb to a crowd. Got it.
Grats on being a completely brainwashed idiot, instead of just an average idiot.
While surely this could have been worded differently for clarity and to lighten the offense, I don't believe its flamebait (just a bit misguided).
I disagree with the post in that it's not just liberals that want to control people's mind, it's an establishment problem that relates to people in office/power and not just liberals. Half of waking up is to notice the corruption, the other half is to start broadening your view to ensure you are getting the full picture.
When the News is manipulated to give you a specific opinion, that is mind control. For example, everyone in the US is under the belief that Iran is evil, hell bent on destroying Israel, and bent on world domination. They have a larger military than most countries in the region, yet have not invaded anyone in over 200 years. Assad from Syria is painted as a horrible dictator today, yet prior to the revolt in Libya, US media repeatedly claimed that Syria was the most progressive country in the Middle East. You won't hear about the Saudi Arabian police killing people for speaking out against the government, or putting a women in jail for driving in US media. Ignore the slave labor problems in Dubai and UAE. Those guys are our friends, so we have TV specials showing you how great they are and fire journalists that cover a story that is not favorable.
You will also hear intentionally manipulated "news" to ensure that you have a biased opinion and reaction. Zimmerman/Martin is an easy example, and on the surface the Ferguson MO is another. OWS was just a bunch of bums, they were not demanding accountability for criminal acts by executives. And when protesters are too big of a nuisance, send in agent provocateurs. I'm sure you remember that during the Oakland OWS protests which turned violent the majority of protestors arrested for violent confrontation were not from California. (Interesting that similar reports are coming from Ferguson IMHO.)
People may want to (falsely) believe that the only kind of mind control is like the Manchurian candidate, because someone shaped their reality to have that belief. Just like most people associate the word "conspiracy" with insanity and impossible. Not rational when you look at it, we all know conspiracies happen. I'm sure you remember the TV show "Survivor" which was full of people conspiring to win. Yet if I told you that a winner was in a conspiracy you may have difficulty agreeing. People will argue that they plotted or planned and manipulated, very rarely will they agree with the term conspiracy.
Shaping thought is not new, not novel, and not unique. We like to think it only happens to those other guys, but it has been happening here for generations. Further, US Media has been working at demoralizing the USA for a long time (has nothing to do with homophobia or sexism, ask for clarity if you are lost). You don't have to like it, and you can surely ignore that portion of reality, but you can't deny the facts. There is plenty of material to study if you so desire.
Last point so that I'm not writing a novel, is that there is more than one reason for the people in power to do this. If the people in power can keep us arguing with each other about our differences they get to stay in power and gain more power. The Hegelian dialectic is exactly this. Own both sides of the argument so that people line up in the center. Provide a problem so that you can implement a solution you want towards a resolution that you want. Hegel was not the first person to understand this social control method, he was just the first person we know of that wrote down the process.
Correct in concept, wrong in practice. Today you are guilty first, and parallel construction will be used to ensure guilt if someone want's you that way. Unless of course you have a whole lot of money, in which case you will never see charges let alone a trial.
I hope you are right that it never happens, but in practice how long was that porn company extorting money from people? Nobody from the company went to jail for extortion to my knowledge, they were just told by a judge to stop. I'm not going to dig past a summary, you can surely do more if you like.
The point is that you should never say never, especially with the high level of corruption we are seeing in the USA. It may be implemented just to test the waters, I personally would not be shocked.
The fact remains that from a technical point of view, if corporate IT want to log your traffic and if you're working on a company machine and talking over the company network, there are tools available that will do that for them and you would never know it was happening without inside information.
This statement is absolutely correct. It differs quite a bit from your original statements which implied that they are snooping and that people should expect it.
I get the feeling that we would agree about the fundamental ethics of the situation anyway.
Based on the statement above it's quite possible. I could have just been too critical of your wording and the implication I mentioned.
This little discussion started when BitZtream argued that a good sysadmin can control "what his company does and doesn't see on company time, company equipment, and company networks". Zero__Kelvin seemed to think SSL would be a barrier to that. It is not.
No issues with how the thread started, it was just the hanging implication I was uncomfortable with. I fully realize a sysadmin can do such things, I don't agree that it's done at any company arbitrarily and unilaterally.
Not at the start, which was during the first antitrust trial. Yes, they later adjusted their claim mostly to keep executives from being guilty of perjury. Subsequent trials did not see the flat out lie, but the variation.
You can search the DOJ for the transcripts of the trial. Groklaw may have copies as well.
I think we have plenty of evidence to the contrary. Microsoft has, and does, willfully provide false information. They do this deliberately and indiscriminately, even to judges while under oath. Maybe you forgot about the claims to a judge that "If you remove Internet Explorer the Operating system stops functioning.". Even though a judge was smart enough to remove IE and show they were lying, nobody went to jail. So the trend continued.
Now what possible motivation would MS have for lying about approving apps? Easy, it's a numbers game. If Apple has half a billion applications how can MS fudge numbers to look relevant and not appear to be deliberate liars? Easy! Let people dump all kinds of crap into their app store so they can claim "look how many applications we have!' and "Look at our growth rate, thousands of new apps every day!". Both are technically true, though based on a lie about monitoring.
MS further can easily blow off the lie about approving content. Expect something along the lines of "Our people were not trained properly" with some bogus "we were hacked" charges sprinkled in for FUD and sympathy.
You have not worked at very many reputable large US companies either. I have worked at or know senior level people at Sun/Oracle, HP, IBM, General Dynamics, Boeing, CSC, Ford, State Farm, AAA, Ericsson, Motorola, and SAP just to name some of the largest.
None of these companies snoop and monitor all internet traffic due to the exact reason I stated, liability. Each has PCI compliant environments, HIPAA environments, and at least 2 of those have classified processing (which is a tertiary rule set which we won't discuss as it does not fall under general rules.
The liability issue you raise with regulated external sites is a fair point, and so are your comments about internal segregation in some contexts. However, please remember that not everywhere has the same legal rules and precedents as the US.
Fair point, I have only worked for US companies with foreign presence. Each foreign office worked exactly like the US offices to ensure compliance. Those are not companies that exist only in a foreign country (E.G. A Company based in France and only in France). Remember that Slashdot is a US site primarily visited by US people. Unless you specify otherwise, the assumption is that generalizations dealing with laws, regulations, and behaviors are that you are discussing US.
But the general principle we were discussing was that sysadmins can have a lot of control about what happens on company networks, and that stands.
Because a sysadmin "can" does not mean they "do". As pointed out, those people are a liability and should not be entrusted with admin rights. Those types of sysadmins don't last very long and end up with DNH (do not hire) flags on their files and references. I'm not claiming that people don't take advantage of power and can't get away with things, I'm claiming it's a minority and I would not work at a place that allowed it to happen.
Art is taught and can be learned, I study this as well as everything else I can find to learn (yes, even at a University). What an artist learns is how to move a persons eye, and how to make aesthetically pleasing art, amongst other things.
As an example, If you draw an X in the center of the canvas and maintain the lines in the painting, people's eyes will be drawn to the center. Numerous Xs will have numerous focal points. Great artists know this, and obscure the lines so it's harder for people to notice. Flat lines are obvious and can be boring.
Layering paints is another one that people can be taught, but can learn on their own. I don't have to teach you the brush strokes required, you would figure it out. If you press a brush on canvas and drag the brush, paint moves in the same way as the brush. Layering requires a touch lift technique (or waiting until paint is dry). We don't need to have the same influences to figure this out, just a little bit of experience with the medium.
In "teaching" art I may be able to hasten your learning curve, but these are two concepts that you would surely figure out on your own. Unless I know you were classically trained I can't claim to know how you were influenced by looking at simply technique.
Like you said, I have no issue with them claiming that they can see what's "similar". Unless an artist admits to being trained by so-and-so or influenced by so-and-so, I don't buy into a piece of software being able to do this just by looking at technique.
As I stated, I would not work at a company that constantly opens and monitors traffic. I have been in the business for nearly 3 decades, much of that in security and compliance work and a decade at the DOD. Not gloating, demonstrating that I am qualified to discuss.
Monitoring email is not the same thing as monitoring and logging everything. Most companies do scan email for threats and block content. It is normally part of an employee disclosure package so that they are aware of this. Scanning email for threats is not the same thing as logging everything and watching everything with a MITM capable device. Apples to orangutang comparison.
PCI environments are segregated networks, by definition. If your company has PCI compliant devices and software running on your main company network you would never pass a legitimate audit. PCI requires that you account for all of the traffic, but if you are logging everything you will lose accreditation because the "everything" would include data you are not allowed to log. In a HIPAA environment you will be fined massively for the same thing. In HIPAA you can have mixed modes, but the HIPAA compliant data must be segregated and protected.
The main liability problem with MITM capable devices is that you don't know who inside your network is talking to a regulated site. I'm guessing that your company has a health plan, and what happens when a user logs in to check coverage? You just logged all of their personal data and are now in breach of HIPAA yourself. The "my company, I can do what I want" does not hold up in court, and has not held up in court.
Like I said, no way should a company use MITM on their own employees. Looking at an end point is fine, but not looking at content. During an investigation, different story because you can legally ignore regulations by court order.
I'm guessing however that you are confusing "monitoring" with logging in your post. If not, and you are working at some small company that logs and monitors everything I'd suggest that you talk to management and change that before you get caught. One employee finding out about this is all it takes to put a company out of business. HIPAA fines are not small, and are cumulative, which is why larger companies don't log _everything_.
No one wants to talk seriously online to total strangers.
Only a special environment composed exclusively of people from a real life community of interest could possibly overcome this.
I very much disagree with both points, especially with such a large generalization.
Many people want to educate others, share different opinions, show different motives for political decisions, etc... For example, the only way to educate people to how corrupt the US Government is, due to the lack of any real "news" in the US, is exactly by talking to strangers.
An easy to examine real life example is the anti CISPA/SOPA campaigns. These campaigns would have failed miserably if they were only discussed by, and for, techies. I remember a good amount of sock puppetry and trolling here on the topic. This was drown out by rational dialogue and people pointing out the bad dialogue which increased awareness. This reduced the bad dialogue and sock puppetry quite a bit, yet if people wanted to read the garbage that was their choice.
To answer TFAs question, the answer is "it depends on how it's done.". I believe that Slashdot, for example, should have a "User Moderator" checking moderation and correcting censorship (named horribly, I know). An example of their function would be to review any rating of "Troll/Flamebait" on a post for a named member. Any time they make a correction they should be required to input why they made their correction, and that should be in full view of the public. They should not have the ability to remove content, and of course corrections should help/harm people's Karma accordingly. I.E. a user moderating people negatively for a differing opinion should have a karma hit, just like a person moderated negatively successfully takes a karma hit.
The primary consideration is that censorship should not be happening on the scale we are currently seeing it, both on web sites and in broadcast media. We, the consumers that see it, need to keep calling it out and stop censorship attempts in all places.
Surely we can't fix all offensive posts or sock puppetry, and that should not be the point of moderation. Moderation is supposed to reward good dialogue, not prevent or remove dialogue.
If people only want to see their own opinions and get/give back slaps for sharing, well, there are plenty of Reddit groups for that.
While I agree with your points about Facebook not being a News site, or a News aggregate site, who is providing the tag for satire? Facebook already sorts news it does not like away from people, and has been caught blocking content they don't like. If Facebook controls the tag then this will just be another tool for censorship, it's not even a question.
If a user chooses to label a post with said said tag, I have no issue with that. I personally would not use such a tag even if I used facebook (have not been there in over a year and even prior would log in every few months). In my opinion, people either get satire or they don't. If you don't get the joke you are the joke, and that is a big part of what satire is. Humiliate people into learning.
Censorship is already here and active, lets not pretend otherwise. Sites like facebook just make it easier to censor and shape public opinion.
There was a report not to long ago about the number of that companies dial up accounts still in use (million+). Those have nothing to do with ad hominem, but with geographical limitations and life style choices (not all of them bad).
That's not meant to imply your X was not an ad hominem, I don't know her.
Unlike you I have seen hipsterism, but it's a minority. You can go to downtown Mountain View any day and see people that look like they are homeless talking business on a smart phone or banging away on a MacBook Pro. I assume that whoever employs them lets them work from home (or downtown Mountain View), and probably prefers it that way.
Outside of the "hipster" appearances, and much more common, I have seen people enter shops and try to change the company to use what ever trend they like. It generally ends the same, with the person being canned. On very rare occasions those people start their own businesses with their idea and it works out.
My point is really that you seem to be using a generalization that is no more valid than TFA or GP. GP tries to claim that "Hipsters" are the problem and ignores management, TFA claims it's all management and not an engineers fault, you imply hipsters don't exist or impact businesses.
One good person can surely make or break a company, and they don't have to hold a certain position. A single "bad" employee may not be able to put a massive company like IBM out of business, but that one person can cause huge financial harm or benefit. That fact is what tends to be neglected by certain managers, often to their detriment.
They don't have to block SSL, they just have to MITM the connection if they need to analyse or log the traffic. IPS and DLP devices that can do this for all the major protocols have been available to professional sysadmins for some time. If you access the Internet from a company device at an organisation that is either very large or working in a particularly sensitive field, there is a good chance your traffic is already being processed in this way.
Unless there is an active investigation against someone, there are no MITM devices tracking and logging everything everyone does and says even at the DOD. It's very expensive to do and creates liability.
Segmentation and monitoring for abnormality sure, but more than that requires justification.
I agree it would be that easy, but look how much money gets dumped into lobbying and pushing these services to keep the masses using them. When it comes down from the top that these things need to be pushed by all spheres of influence, that means everyone. Schools and Universities are extremely influential, and people know this. Until there is another social control mechanism handy, these will continue to be pushed.
Being pushed does not imply that everyone will use it,
A-O-L is still around believe it or not. They are like a really crappy version of that steaming pile called Ya-*cough*-hoo, who I wish would die a quick painful death. I had to obscure the companies names. I'd hate for a search engine to see the name in full and someone accidentally stumble on to that crap.
I know of at least one other company (Echoworx EMG) that released encrypted mail (Server and Client) that is not Lotus Notes. I don't get paid to advertise for them but do have some experience with the product and it works very well.
I'd guess there are more such companies, but you can search them out on your own if you are interested.
Firefox is not a problem for this. Worst case you keep a text file with all your various proxy servers and copy/paste into settings. At best you use DNS as it's intended. proxy.prod.net, proxy.dev.net, proxy.qa.net, etc.. That and a functional proxy script on each of your hosts is like magic.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this an attempt at trolling, or demonstrating how poor your reading comprehension skills are? To be very clear, this is not how things are, but how they should be in concept.
My wife does 100% of her work as a writer on her Chromebook and various Android devices.
If you would have stuck with just claiming that she worked on a Chromebook, I may believe you. While not "great" in terms of anything, it's at least possible. A Chromebook is like laptop. Of course with poorer performance, crappy graphics, and limited software available.
I have no idea why you would toss out the claim of Android, are you getting paid to shill? Kind of like someone claiming "My wife does 100% of her work a Macbook and iphone/ipad.". Obviously the majority of the work is on the Macbook, and "yes" I would ask them the same question.
Zoning for the infrastructure is the smallest part of the problem and the easiest to solve. It does however require thinking differently. To be very clear, this is not how things are, but how they should be in concept. Additional comments at the end of this post are not directed at you, please take no offense (I try to warn trolls away).
The Government is not supposed to "own" any land. They are supposed to work with the citizens to zone it properly, but the citizens own the land because the Government is the people (that's the theory at any rate). Since the Government does not own land, they can't lease or rent it out. They can only enforce the zoning that the people agree to.
If that theory was the practice, you and I could both own ISPs and lay our own cables/wires in the zones we are allotted. If the government gives us 1/2" to work in and share, the Government failed to zone properly. You and I should ensure that we don't muck with each others cables when laying things out, and the Government's job is to ensure I am liable if I damage your stuff and visa versa. "Leasing" us space on land they don't own is impossible.
This puts more accountability at a lower level, and that's how it should be. It reduces the footprint for potential corruption, and again that's how it should be.
I'm not anti-government by any means. I believe that some Government is required for society to function and thrive. Government should be a very minimal part of our lives in my opinion, but necessary.
Someone may comment and claim "but water", or "but power lines" and my answer will be the same. The problems we see today are due to both corruption and business not being held accountable for wrong doing. People want to claim that the Government is protecting them, but look at how many monopolies we have today. Look how many accidents there are with this alleged protection (Bruno CA). We have seen costs increase drastically on basic services because of monopolization, and QOS go down the toilet. The fact is that while Government has increased massively in the last decade everything in the private sector has gotten worse, so more government can not be the answer.
Now we need the quasi-obligatory response that this is really a government problem, and if government weren't in there mucking about with needless regulation the free market would address the problem and we'd all be in broadband utopia at reasonable prices.
Perhaps I don't quite understand your wording and this is not double speak, but assuming you wrote correctly this is a Government problem. At least in the realm of what the Governments role is supposed to be in a Capitalist economy.
The majority of monopolization in the US is due exactly to monopolization by Government intervention. You may have to go deep to see it, and many people don't want to look that far, but it's all there. Start with Patent law and work your way out. Even if I could provide a better cheaper solution I could not implement it because I'd be stopped by the Government due to violating someone's patent.
And lets not bullshit each other, the majority of the millions of patents (I'd say 99.9%) approved every year do not deal with actual inventions, but ideas that someone now owns. Many of these are never implemented, because it would harm the patent owners market share and profit margins.
As I started with, it's possible that your statement is just worded in an obscure fashion and you would agree that this problem is due to the government.
I'm not short sighted, I'm a realist. There is currently no profit to be had by trying to colonize the moon, Mars, mine Asteroids, or anything else in space. Rumors have said that rare minerals may exist in these places, but this lacks evidence.
Don't confuse that with claiming it's impossible, just that lacking evidence it's cheaper to sit here and cause trouble to increase wealth (which we see on massive scale) than it is to explore space and find giant diamonds and asteroids full of gold. If we had more evidence things may be different.
I'm not sure if that is a threat or a movie quote. If it's a threat, I am only frightened by your lack of grammatical skills. The "echelons you talked about" do and the rest of what you state is jibberish. Care to make another attempt in English?
Were we not just told a few months ago by NASA that colonizing Mars would be impossible due to moral issues? I'm too lazy at the moment to go dig this up, be my guest.
I'm all for this, but don't see anyone actually spending the money required to colonize anything. In a profit driven society where the greater good equates to "my phat wallet" it won't happen. At least not while the majority of money in the world is in the hands of about 2 dozen families.
So people that shit on others, circumvent and break the law, and basically shit on people at every possible opportunity to make personal gains are to be looked up to when they toss a crumb to a crowd. Got it.
Grats on being a completely brainwashed idiot, instead of just an average idiot.
While surely this could have been worded differently for clarity and to lighten the offense, I don't believe its flamebait (just a bit misguided).
I disagree with the post in that it's not just liberals that want to control people's mind, it's an establishment problem that relates to people in office/power and not just liberals. Half of waking up is to notice the corruption, the other half is to start broadening your view to ensure you are getting the full picture.
When the News is manipulated to give you a specific opinion, that is mind control. For example, everyone in the US is under the belief that Iran is evil, hell bent on destroying Israel, and bent on world domination. They have a larger military than most countries in the region, yet have not invaded anyone in over 200 years. Assad from Syria is painted as a horrible dictator today, yet prior to the revolt in Libya, US media repeatedly claimed that Syria was the most progressive country in the Middle East. You won't hear about the Saudi Arabian police killing people for speaking out against the government, or putting a women in jail for driving in US media. Ignore the slave labor problems in Dubai and UAE. Those guys are our friends, so we have TV specials showing you how great they are and fire journalists that cover a story that is not favorable.
You will also hear intentionally manipulated "news" to ensure that you have a biased opinion and reaction. Zimmerman/Martin is an easy example, and on the surface the Ferguson MO is another. OWS was just a bunch of bums, they were not demanding accountability for criminal acts by executives. And when protesters are too big of a nuisance, send in agent provocateurs. I'm sure you remember that during the Oakland OWS protests which turned violent the majority of protestors arrested for violent confrontation were not from California. (Interesting that similar reports are coming from Ferguson IMHO.)
People may want to (falsely) believe that the only kind of mind control is like the Manchurian candidate, because someone shaped their reality to have that belief. Just like most people associate the word "conspiracy" with insanity and impossible. Not rational when you look at it, we all know conspiracies happen. I'm sure you remember the TV show "Survivor" which was full of people conspiring to win. Yet if I told you that a winner was in a conspiracy you may have difficulty agreeing. People will argue that they plotted or planned and manipulated, very rarely will they agree with the term conspiracy.
Shaping thought is not new, not novel, and not unique. We like to think it only happens to those other guys, but it has been happening here for generations. Further, US Media has been working at demoralizing the USA for a long time (has nothing to do with homophobia or sexism, ask for clarity if you are lost). You don't have to like it, and you can surely ignore that portion of reality, but you can't deny the facts. There is plenty of material to study if you so desire.
Last point so that I'm not writing a novel, is that there is more than one reason for the people in power to do this. If the people in power can keep us arguing with each other about our differences they get to stay in power and gain more power. The Hegelian dialectic is exactly this. Own both sides of the argument so that people line up in the center. Provide a problem so that you can implement a solution you want towards a resolution that you want. Hegel was not the first person to understand this social control method, he was just the first person we know of that wrote down the process.
Correct in concept, wrong in practice. Today you are guilty first, and parallel construction will be used to ensure guilt if someone want's you that way. Unless of course you have a whole lot of money, in which case you will never see charges let alone a trial.
I hope you are right that it never happens, but in practice how long was that porn company extorting money from people? Nobody from the company went to jail for extortion to my knowledge, they were just told by a judge to stop. I'm not going to dig past a summary, you can surely do more if you like.
The point is that you should never say never, especially with the high level of corruption we are seeing in the USA. It may be implemented just to test the waters, I personally would not be shocked.
I believe we reached an agreeable point!
The fact remains that from a technical point of view, if corporate IT want to log your traffic and if you're working on a company machine and talking over the company network, there are tools available that will do that for them and you would never know it was happening without inside information.
This statement is absolutely correct. It differs quite a bit from your original statements which implied that they are snooping and that people should expect it.
I get the feeling that we would agree about the fundamental ethics of the situation anyway.
Based on the statement above it's quite possible. I could have just been too critical of your wording and the implication I mentioned.
This little discussion started when BitZtream argued that a good sysadmin can control "what his company does and doesn't see on company time, company equipment, and company networks". Zero__Kelvin seemed to think SSL would be a barrier to that. It is not.
No issues with how the thread started, it was just the hanging implication I was uncomfortable with. I fully realize a sysadmin can do such things, I don't agree that it's done at any company arbitrarily and unilaterally.
Thanks for the courteous dialogue!!
Not at the start, which was during the first antitrust trial. Yes, they later adjusted their claim mostly to keep executives from being guilty of perjury. Subsequent trials did not see the flat out lie, but the variation.
You can search the DOJ for the transcripts of the trial. Groklaw may have copies as well.
I think we have plenty of evidence to the contrary. Microsoft has, and does, willfully provide false information. They do this deliberately and indiscriminately, even to judges while under oath. Maybe you forgot about the claims to a judge that "If you remove Internet Explorer the Operating system stops functioning.". Even though a judge was smart enough to remove IE and show they were lying, nobody went to jail. So the trend continued.
Now what possible motivation would MS have for lying about approving apps? Easy, it's a numbers game. If Apple has half a billion applications how can MS fudge numbers to look relevant and not appear to be deliberate liars? Easy! Let people dump all kinds of crap into their app store so they can claim "look how many applications we have!' and "Look at our growth rate, thousands of new apps every day!". Both are technically true, though based on a lie about monitoring.
MS further can easily blow off the lie about approving content. Expect something along the lines of "Our people were not trained properly" with some bogus "we were hacked" charges sprinkled in for FUD and sympathy.
You have not worked at very many reputable large US companies either. I have worked at or know senior level people at Sun/Oracle, HP, IBM, General Dynamics, Boeing, CSC, Ford, State Farm, AAA, Ericsson, Motorola, and SAP just to name some of the largest.
None of these companies snoop and monitor all internet traffic due to the exact reason I stated, liability. Each has PCI compliant environments, HIPAA environments, and at least 2 of those have classified processing (which is a tertiary rule set which we won't discuss as it does not fall under general rules.
The liability issue you raise with regulated external sites is a fair point, and so are your comments about internal segregation in some contexts. However, please remember that not everywhere has the same legal rules and precedents as the US.
Fair point, I have only worked for US companies with foreign presence. Each foreign office worked exactly like the US offices to ensure compliance. Those are not companies that exist only in a foreign country (E.G. A Company based in France and only in France). Remember that Slashdot is a US site primarily visited by US people. Unless you specify otherwise, the assumption is that generalizations dealing with laws, regulations, and behaviors are that you are discussing US.
But the general principle we were discussing was that sysadmins can have a lot of control about what happens on company networks, and that stands.
Because a sysadmin "can" does not mean they "do". As pointed out, those people are a liability and should not be entrusted with admin rights. Those types of sysadmins don't last very long and end up with DNH (do not hire) flags on their files and references. I'm not claiming that people don't take advantage of power and can't get away with things, I'm claiming it's a minority and I would not work at a place that allowed it to happen.
Art is taught and can be learned, I study this as well as everything else I can find to learn (yes, even at a University). What an artist learns is how to move a persons eye, and how to make aesthetically pleasing art, amongst other things.
As an example, If you draw an X in the center of the canvas and maintain the lines in the painting, people's eyes will be drawn to the center. Numerous Xs will have numerous focal points. Great artists know this, and obscure the lines so it's harder for people to notice. Flat lines are obvious and can be boring.
Layering paints is another one that people can be taught, but can learn on their own. I don't have to teach you the brush strokes required, you would figure it out. If you press a brush on canvas and drag the brush, paint moves in the same way as the brush. Layering requires a touch lift technique (or waiting until paint is dry). We don't need to have the same influences to figure this out, just a little bit of experience with the medium.
In "teaching" art I may be able to hasten your learning curve, but these are two concepts that you would surely figure out on your own. Unless I know you were classically trained I can't claim to know how you were influenced by looking at simply technique.
Like you said, I have no issue with them claiming that they can see what's "similar". Unless an artist admits to being trained by so-and-so or influenced by so-and-so, I don't buy into a piece of software being able to do this just by looking at technique.
As I stated, I would not work at a company that constantly opens and monitors traffic. I have been in the business for nearly 3 decades, much of that in security and compliance work and a decade at the DOD. Not gloating, demonstrating that I am qualified to discuss.
Monitoring email is not the same thing as monitoring and logging everything. Most companies do scan email for threats and block content. It is normally part of an employee disclosure package so that they are aware of this. Scanning email for threats is not the same thing as logging everything and watching everything with a MITM capable device. Apples to orangutang comparison.
PCI environments are segregated networks, by definition. If your company has PCI compliant devices and software running on your main company network you would never pass a legitimate audit. PCI requires that you account for all of the traffic, but if you are logging everything you will lose accreditation because the "everything" would include data you are not allowed to log. In a HIPAA environment you will be fined massively for the same thing. In HIPAA you can have mixed modes, but the HIPAA compliant data must be segregated and protected.
The main liability problem with MITM capable devices is that you don't know who inside your network is talking to a regulated site. I'm guessing that your company has a health plan, and what happens when a user logs in to check coverage? You just logged all of their personal data and are now in breach of HIPAA yourself. The "my company, I can do what I want" does not hold up in court, and has not held up in court.
Like I said, no way should a company use MITM on their own employees. Looking at an end point is fine, but not looking at content. During an investigation, different story because you can legally ignore regulations by court order.
I'm guessing however that you are confusing "monitoring" with logging in your post. If not, and you are working at some small company that logs and monitors everything I'd suggest that you talk to management and change that before you get caught. One employee finding out about this is all it takes to put a company out of business. HIPAA fines are not small, and are cumulative, which is why larger companies don't log _everything_.
No one wants to talk seriously online to total strangers.
Only a special environment composed exclusively of people from a real life community of interest could possibly overcome this.
I very much disagree with both points, especially with such a large generalization.
Many people want to educate others, share different opinions, show different motives for political decisions, etc... For example, the only way to educate people to how corrupt the US Government is, due to the lack of any real "news" in the US, is exactly by talking to strangers.
An easy to examine real life example is the anti CISPA/SOPA campaigns. These campaigns would have failed miserably if they were only discussed by, and for, techies. I remember a good amount of sock puppetry and trolling here on the topic. This was drown out by rational dialogue and people pointing out the bad dialogue which increased awareness. This reduced the bad dialogue and sock puppetry quite a bit, yet if people wanted to read the garbage that was their choice.
To answer TFAs question, the answer is "it depends on how it's done.". I believe that Slashdot, for example, should have a "User Moderator" checking moderation and correcting censorship (named horribly, I know). An example of their function would be to review any rating of "Troll/Flamebait" on a post for a named member. Any time they make a correction they should be required to input why they made their correction, and that should be in full view of the public. They should not have the ability to remove content, and of course corrections should help/harm people's Karma accordingly. I.E. a user moderating people negatively for a differing opinion should have a karma hit, just like a person moderated negatively successfully takes a karma hit.
The primary consideration is that censorship should not be happening on the scale we are currently seeing it, both on web sites and in broadcast media. We, the consumers that see it, need to keep calling it out and stop censorship attempts in all places.
Surely we can't fix all offensive posts or sock puppetry, and that should not be the point of moderation. Moderation is supposed to reward good dialogue, not prevent or remove dialogue.
If people only want to see their own opinions and get/give back slaps for sharing, well, there are plenty of Reddit groups for that.
While I agree with your points about Facebook not being a News site, or a News aggregate site, who is providing the tag for satire? Facebook already sorts news it does not like away from people, and has been caught blocking content they don't like. If Facebook controls the tag then this will just be another tool for censorship, it's not even a question.
If a user chooses to label a post with said said tag, I have no issue with that. I personally would not use such a tag even if I used facebook (have not been there in over a year and even prior would log in every few months). In my opinion, people either get satire or they don't. If you don't get the joke you are the joke, and that is a big part of what satire is. Humiliate people into learning.
Censorship is already here and active, lets not pretend otherwise. Sites like facebook just make it easier to censor and shape public opinion.
There was a report not to long ago about the number of that companies dial up accounts still in use (million+). Those have nothing to do with ad hominem, but with geographical limitations and life style choices (not all of them bad).
That's not meant to imply your X was not an ad hominem, I don't know her.
Unlike you I have seen hipsterism, but it's a minority. You can go to downtown Mountain View any day and see people that look like they are homeless talking business on a smart phone or banging away on a MacBook Pro. I assume that whoever employs them lets them work from home (or downtown Mountain View), and probably prefers it that way.
Outside of the "hipster" appearances, and much more common, I have seen people enter shops and try to change the company to use what ever trend they like. It generally ends the same, with the person being canned. On very rare occasions those people start their own businesses with their idea and it works out.
My point is really that you seem to be using a generalization that is no more valid than TFA or GP. GP tries to claim that "Hipsters" are the problem and ignores management, TFA claims it's all management and not an engineers fault, you imply hipsters don't exist or impact businesses.
One good person can surely make or break a company, and they don't have to hold a certain position. A single "bad" employee may not be able to put a massive company like IBM out of business, but that one person can cause huge financial harm or benefit. That fact is what tends to be neglected by certain managers, often to their detriment.
They don't have to block SSL, they just have to MITM the connection if they need to analyse or log the traffic. IPS and DLP devices that can do this for all the major protocols have been available to professional sysadmins for some time. If you access the Internet from a company device at an organisation that is either very large or working in a particularly sensitive field, there is a good chance your traffic is already being processed in this way.
Unless there is an active investigation against someone, there are no MITM devices tracking and logging everything everyone does and says even at the DOD. It's very expensive to do and creates liability.
Segmentation and monitoring for abnormality sure, but more than that requires justification.
I agree it would be that easy, but look how much money gets dumped into lobbying and pushing these services to keep the masses using them. When it comes down from the top that these things need to be pushed by all spheres of influence, that means everyone. Schools and Universities are extremely influential, and people know this. Until there is another social control mechanism handy, these will continue to be pushed.
Being pushed does not imply that everyone will use it,
A-O-L is still around believe it or not. They are like a really crappy version of that steaming pile called Ya-*cough*-hoo, who I wish would die a quick painful death. I had to obscure the companies names. I'd hate for a search engine to see the name in full and someone accidentally stumble on to that crap.
I know of at least one other company (Echoworx EMG) that released encrypted mail (Server and Client) that is not Lotus Notes. I don't get paid to advertise for them but do have some experience with the product and it works very well.
I'd guess there are more such companies, but you can search them out on your own if you are interested.
Firefox is not a problem for this. Worst case you keep a text file with all your various proxy servers and copy/paste into settings. At best you use DNS as it's intended. proxy.prod.net, proxy.dev.net, proxy.qa.net, etc.. That and a functional proxy script on each of your hosts is like magic.