Is it possible that all of us, right now, are logged into a spoofed page that has replaced the real Slashdot for reasons known only to GCHQ and the NSA? 'Beta' is probably the final stage in whatever sinister plot they have planned for us.
I would think a more believable story is that the NSA/GCHQ is simply paying Dice to destroy a possible/actual forum for IT dissent.
More honestly, "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence". The simplest explanation is that Dice has no idea what they are doing, and don't care to.
WTF is wrong with you people? It's just a fucking web site.
Technically yes. But it is also the geek discussion forum on the web.
As a friend of mine said a few years ago: "Every tech-head on the planet goes to Slashdot". He was right. Slashdot is more than an ordinary website. It is practically an internet public house, a geek watering-hole, international web discussion forum, and the best sources of technology "lore" around. We have all learned more, about life and tech, from lone comments here than from any course, job, or textbook.
I don't think Dice understands any of this. I don't think they really get just how wide and deep the feelings behind sites like Slashdot go. Geeks regard this site in the same way as Brits regard the BBC, or possibly their Queen. Sure we might we tired of it, rail on things, and complain about the editors; but if you try to take it away or destroy it completely... , you are toying with the unspoken forces on which the internet is built. I'm being very serious.
Honestly. I honestly think that Slashdot needs to be taken into the care of some kind of non-profit organization, or other public trust. The existence of this site, and the value of its comment system, to the world at large is such that it is unwise to leave it in the hands of a private company, particularly one so seemingly keen to destroy it.
I think the solution to this is for Slashdotters to set up a non-profit and use a kickstarter fund to buy the site back from Dice. I image there are quite a few people around here who would be more than able to manage just about every aspect of the operation. (Where is Taco during all this anyway?)
Outside of outraging their user base it will cost them in destroying/.'s brand and following - what they definitely paid more for than whatever they've thrown at the beta dev.
It's possible that the Dice has some ingenious plan to chase away all the old-guard Slashdot users, allowing them to claim the name and refashion it as a kind of "tech-cred" brand to sell products to Hipsters, Brogramers, and PHBs using the old Slashdot's reputation.
Though it's more likely that no-one at Dice knows or cares about what they are doing.
Because someone's "UX credentials" are on the line, and like a desperado firing blanks, they find going down in a blaze of glory, taking the site with them, as preferable to a gracious climbdown.
You've got to undertand, some industries/careers are built not on technical merit, but on pure Front. Law, management, trendy design: If you lose face in such industries, your career is basically over. What your ostensibly supposed to be doing has nothing to do with it.
Clearly, the NZ and US both really, REALLY want to crucify Dot Com and are willing to break the law, cheat, lie, steal, defraud and everything else in order to do it.
The question I keep asking is: Why?
Oh I know that businesses and corporations the world over hate Dot-Com, but why would public employees in NZ and the US be willing to break the law over this? I cannot grasp why civil servants would go out on a limb like this over what basically amounts to a frivolous case.
If you were a desk-jocky in NZ law enforcement, why would take the risk of destroying document and potentially go to jail, when you could simply not both, and have only your career on the line. It's not like they fire public servants.
Sometimes I think the screw ups in these operations are a result of ground level employees deliberately doing their job instead of following orders that could get them arrested.
Security means encryption + integrity + authentication. Period. Anything less is no longer secure.
Why? Why should this be the standard for "security"?
How are we to certify encryption, integrity, or authentication? Through certification authorities? Or trusting organisations like NIST? Are we to hope that our data will have integrity anywhere in an internet which is dystopianly dominated by agencies like the NSA?
Your standards are arbitrary, and ultimately flawed. Dogmatic adherence to them has lead Mozilla at least to all but blacklist general purpose basic encryption (sans "security") on the web, and has lead to a world where all data is up for grabs by default, and which in fact has been so grabbed.
Firefox should not be making decisions for users on whether or not authentication less encryption is a good or bad thing. Just don't highlight self signed certs with a yellow lock bar was all anyone could want. But Mozilla went beyond this and the encrypted web has been set back by a decade or more.
P.S. (I increasingly believe that Mozilla's decision, and quite possibly the encryption communities dogmatic insistence on authentication were in part motivated by the NSAs soft influence./notobviouslyparanoidanymoretinfoil)
3)Quite possibly the biggest problem with HTTPS is the fact that users have been trained over many years to just click "accept/install certificate" on self-signed certs. Not knowing that if you do this you are no longer secure.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Get your head out of Applied Cryptography and come into the real world.
Accepting a self signed cert means your connection is far more secure than an unencrypted one. Oh there could be a myth in the middle attack, but in that even a CA verified cert is only secure by one more party. Let me put it in a table
CA cert: 2 parties (In theory) Self-signed cert: 2-3 parties (1 hijacker in theory) Unencrypted connection: 2-n parties (where n is the total number of people with access to plaintext traffic across all networks the message is transmitted through.)
Do I even need to add how much traffic is being transmitted wirelessly nowadays? Do I?
Let me ask you directly: Do you believe that a person trusting a self-signed cert is less secure than a person using an unencrypted connection? Honestly? Don't try to redefine security to mean encryption+trust; not now, not after the NSA mass surveillance revelations. Just don't.
Just tell me who is more secure: Aunt Tillie sending all her emails over unencrypted connections, or Dave sending his emails to a server with a self-signed cert? Who is more secure?
Why should I pay for content that amounts to Propaganda, supporting increasingly corrupted civic institutions and companies, all against my own interest. And this is even more my eyeballs are the product being sold to advertisers.
Legal reasoning is beyond 1+1=2. I wish it were that easy but it requires subtleties that aren't taught in engineering school.
And the most subtle of all these subtleties is that in the end, the Law is less of a system of rules and more of a pantomime in service to the governing classes. It no longer matters what the Silk Road founder did or did not do. The Law will find a way to satisfy the powers he has offended.
I believe "nightsoil men" used to sell the human waste they carried away to tanners and farmers. In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one. The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon.
Can anyone give a few points on how this is good for the general internet user?
The presence of a custom TLD on a website is an instant indicator for me that the website is almost certainly a flash in the pan marketing project, not being taken very seriously by its owners, and probably not worth my time to click on the link.
This is not an isolated incident. Our society has rewarded, and is percieved to rewards cheating, duplicitiousness, dishonesty and fraud. The Justice system has been seen to go out of its way _not_ to prosecute certain crimes.
The rot caused by this breakdown in law and order has clearly reached the military. How much longer will the US allow basic standards to slide?
Nuance is out, and so seem to be reassessment and compromise.
Ridiculous. Nuance and compromise are just fine. The problem here is extremism.
Organisations like the NSA and their supporters are extremists. It is extremist to suggest that every phone call, email, web page connection and Facebook Like should be monitored and recorded by a security agency. Extremist.
A reasonable person would suggest some communications traffic me monitored. A hardliner would demand that more traffic be monitored. But only an extremist would call for absolutely all traffic to be monitored. I'm not sure what you would call someone who actually goes about doing so.
We're supposed to put aside the dystopian scale of NSA surveillance, and sit down to debate "both sides" of this? There is no "both sides" here. We have a one group of dangerous megalomaniacs who want to monitor all communications traffic on planet earth and -- the rest of us.
Naunce is fine. What the NSA is doing is wrong; wrong enough to blow all nuances right out of the water. You may as well asked people to be nuanced about a man building a hydrogen-bomb in his shed.
Min-Maxing like this is destroying our society. Sure, you can spend time straining data to improve your tennis game. But you will either do one of two things:
1) Develop a significant improvement, whihc then forces all other players to jump on the bandwagon of diminishing returns technological statistics to stay competative, driving up the costs and time involved in playing the game or 2) Fail to develop any significant improvement, in which case everyone will still chase these developments but the time and money spent will simply be a complete waste of everyone's time verses mostly being a waste.
In either case, you will certainly have:
A) Ruined the game of tennis for pretty much everyone who plays it.
This is what happens when you Min-Max games, work, life, anything. Sure, you might win. Sure your might improve play. But you will ruin whatever it is you are min-maxing. Somehow, someway, the costs you have added to the activity will end up being bourne by someone.
Min-maxing isn't actually concrete progress. Nothing new or significant is being created here. It's just a reallocation of exisiting finite resources to "win" at a game, or job, or activity of any kind which is still the same. Everyone thinks so much inside the box that they end up breaking it without ever dreaming what life would be like outside the box, or without the box entirely. The quintessential example of this is the computerisation arms races in modern finance.
If you invent a new chemical polymer, or a new aerospace rocket, a new software algorithm, or hell a new kind of sports game, you are actually making progress, advancing humanity however slightly. If you spend all day trying to gain a technological edge in tennis, or shave off a few microcents in the stock market, then you are part of the growing legion of hamster-wheelers, running the world ragged by optimising within constraints instead of finding ways to break out of those constraints entirely.
Snowden should run for President, or possibly better, vice-President. America needs heroes right now. Failing that, NSA Director would be a good outcome for everyone.
The better video is one of Job's earlier talks on the founding of Apple. Quite apart from the bespectacled, obviously geeky Jobs on display, a very striking aspect of the talk is Jobs' discussion of his visit to a local elementary school where he witnessed primary school students using computers. This event was one Jobs' continually referred back to later in his career, but this is probably first public discussion of the event which formed or else solidified his view that the PC industry could have/was having a profound impact on society. It's easy to see how someone could become evangelical about computers after being at the very coalface of such processes.
In this particular instance, you have an employer that is NOT nearby making the fact that this location is not nearby a non-issue for its employees and causing gentrification in a way that mostly leaves current residents out of the loop since it's not likely the average resident could get a job at Google
Basically, Good and its employees are using vast company resources to min/max the rental market and ordinary residents end up bearing the resulting resulting rising costs.
I am literally drowing in passwords. Over the last week, I've had to create at least a half dozen new user/password combinations. I doubt I'll ever use most of them again, but I don't want to use the same password or variations thereof on multiple sites.
At this point, the "Register" prompt is enough to send me screaming in horror away from sites. Maybe this is for the best.
I blame the nerds for driving everyone else out of certain fields with their naked and open hostility towards: women, minorities, political groups, windows users, console players, facebook users, sports fans, people who haven't read Ender's Game and those who display emotions outside of forums posts and D&D games.
This isn't a troll. I am seriously blaming nerds for being openly hostile to the wider adoption of Computer Science and programming. It's a problem and the sooner it is owned up to the sooner a solution can be found.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think a more believable story is that the NSA/GCHQ is simply paying Dice to destroy a possible/actual forum for IT dissent.
More honestly, "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence". The simplest explanation is that Dice has no idea what they are doing, and don't care to.
Technically yes. But it is also the geek discussion forum on the web.
As a friend of mine said a few years ago: "Every tech-head on the planet goes to Slashdot". He was right. Slashdot is more than an ordinary website. It is practically an internet public house, a geek watering-hole, international web discussion forum, and the best sources of technology "lore" around. We have all learned more, about life and tech, from lone comments here than from any course, job, or textbook.
I don't think Dice understands any of this. I don't think they really get just how wide and deep the feelings behind sites like Slashdot go. Geeks regard this site in the same way as Brits regard the BBC, or possibly their Queen. Sure we might we tired of it, rail on things, and complain about the editors; but if you try to take it away or destroy it completely... , you are toying with the unspoken forces on which the internet is built. I'm being very serious.
Honestly. I honestly think that Slashdot needs to be taken into the care of some kind of non-profit organization, or other public trust. The existence of this site, and the value of its comment system, to the world at large is such that it is unwise to leave it in the hands of a private company, particularly one so seemingly keen to destroy it.
I think the solution to this is for Slashdotters to set up a non-profit and use a kickstarter fund to buy the site back from Dice. I image there are quite a few people around here who would be more than able to manage just about every aspect of the operation. (Where is Taco during all this anyway?)
I'm Slashdot!
It's possible that the Dice has some ingenious plan to chase away all the old-guard Slashdot users, allowing them to claim the name and refashion it as a kind of "tech-cred" brand to sell products to Hipsters, Brogramers, and PHBs using the old Slashdot's reputation.
Though it's more likely that no-one at Dice knows or cares about what they are doing.
Because someone's "UX credentials" are on the line, and like a desperado firing blanks, they find going down in a blaze of glory, taking the site with them, as preferable to a gracious climbdown.
You've got to undertand, some industries/careers are built not on technical merit, but on pure Front. Law, management, trendy design: If you lose face in such industries, your career is basically over. What your ostensibly supposed to be doing has nothing to do with it.
Maybe the design is form the best. Maybe we are spending too much time here.
The question I keep asking is: Why?
Oh I know that businesses and corporations the world over hate Dot-Com, but why would public employees in NZ and the US be willing to break the law over this? I cannot grasp why civil servants would go out on a limb like this over what basically amounts to a frivolous case.
If you were a desk-jocky in NZ law enforcement, why would take the risk of destroying document and potentially go to jail, when you could simply not both, and have only your career on the line. It's not like they fire public servants.
Sometimes I think the screw ups in these operations are a result of ground level employees deliberately doing their job instead of following orders that could get them arrested.
Why? Why should this be the standard for "security"?
How are we to certify encryption, integrity, or authentication? Through certification authorities? Or trusting organisations like NIST? Are we to hope that our data will have integrity anywhere in an internet which is dystopianly dominated by agencies like the NSA?
Your standards are arbitrary, and ultimately flawed. Dogmatic adherence to them has lead Mozilla at least to all but blacklist general purpose basic encryption (sans "security") on the web, and has lead to a world where all data is up for grabs by default, and which in fact has been so grabbed.
Firefox should not be making decisions for users on whether or not authentication less encryption is a good or bad thing. Just don't highlight self signed certs with a yellow lock bar was all anyone could want. But Mozilla went beyond this and the encrypted web has been set back by a decade or more.
P.S. /notobviouslyparanoidanymoretinfoil)
(I increasingly believe that Mozilla's decision, and quite possibly the encryption communities dogmatic insistence on authentication were in part motivated by the NSAs soft influence.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Get your head out of Applied Cryptography and come into the real world.
Accepting a self signed cert means your connection is far more secure than an unencrypted one. Oh there could be a myth in the middle attack, but in that even a CA verified cert is only secure by one more party. Let me put it in a table
CA cert: 2 parties (In theory)
Self-signed cert: 2-3 parties (1 hijacker in theory)
Unencrypted connection: 2-n parties (where n is the total number of people with access to plaintext traffic across all networks the message is transmitted through.)
Do I even need to add how much traffic is being transmitted wirelessly nowadays? Do I?
Let me ask you directly: Do you believe that a person trusting a self-signed cert is less secure than a person using an unencrypted connection? Honestly? Don't try to redefine security to mean encryption+trust; not now, not after the NSA mass surveillance revelations. Just don't.
Just tell me who is more secure: Aunt Tillie sending all her emails over unencrypted connections, or Dave sending his emails to a server with a self-signed cert? Who is more secure?
Why should I pay for content that amounts to Propaganda, supporting increasingly corrupted civic institutions and companies, all against my own interest. And this is even more my eyeballs are the product being sold to advertisers.
Why should I pay one penny for a word of this?
And the most subtle of all these subtleties is that in the end, the Law is less of a system of rules and more of a pantomime in service to the governing classes. It no longer matters what the Silk Road founder did or did not do. The Law will find a way to satisfy the powers he has offended.
Emotion is a fact.
I believe "nightsoil men" used to sell the human waste they carried away to tanners and farmers. In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one. The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon.
There are wikipedia citations. This thesis must be watertight!
The presence of a custom TLD on a website is an instant indicator for me that the website is almost certainly a flash in the pan marketing project, not being taken very seriously by its owners, and probably not worth my time to click on the link.
Pluses all-round I'd say.
This is not an isolated incident. Our society has rewarded, and is percieved to rewards cheating, duplicitiousness, dishonesty and fraud. The Justice system has been seen to go out of its way _not_ to prosecute certain crimes.
The rot caused by this breakdown in law and order has clearly reached the military. How much longer will the US allow basic standards to slide?
Ridiculous. Nuance and compromise are just fine. The problem here is extremism.
Organisations like the NSA and their supporters are extremists. It is extremist to suggest that every phone call, email, web page connection and Facebook Like should be monitored and recorded by a security agency. Extremist.
A reasonable person would suggest some communications traffic me monitored. A hardliner would demand that more traffic be monitored. But only an extremist would call for absolutely all traffic to be monitored. I'm not sure what you would call someone who actually goes about doing so.
We're supposed to put aside the dystopian scale of NSA surveillance, and sit down to debate "both sides" of this? There is no "both sides" here. We have a one group of dangerous megalomaniacs who want to monitor all communications traffic on planet earth and -- the rest of us.
Naunce is fine. What the NSA is doing is wrong; wrong enough to blow all nuances right out of the water. You may as well asked people to be nuanced about a man building a hydrogen-bomb in his shed.
Min-Maxing like this is destroying our society. Sure, you can spend time straining data to improve your tennis game. But you will either do one of two things:
1) Develop a significant improvement, whihc then forces all other players to jump on the bandwagon of diminishing returns technological statistics to stay competative, driving up the costs and time involved in playing the game or
2) Fail to develop any significant improvement, in which case everyone will still chase these developments but the time and money spent will simply be a complete waste of everyone's time verses mostly being a waste.
In either case, you will certainly have:
A) Ruined the game of tennis for pretty much everyone who plays it.
This is what happens when you Min-Max games, work, life, anything. Sure, you might win. Sure your might improve play. But you will ruin whatever it is you are min-maxing. Somehow, someway, the costs you have added to the activity will end up being bourne by someone.
Min-maxing isn't actually concrete progress. Nothing new or significant is being created here. It's just a reallocation of exisiting finite resources to "win" at a game, or job, or activity of any kind which is still the same. Everyone thinks so much inside the box that they end up breaking it without ever dreaming what life would be like outside the box, or without the box entirely. The quintessential example of this is the computerisation arms races in modern finance.
If you invent a new chemical polymer, or a new aerospace rocket, a new software algorithm, or hell a new kind of sports game, you are actually making progress, advancing humanity however slightly. If you spend all day trying to gain a technological edge in tennis, or shave off a few microcents in the stock market, then you are part of the growing legion of hamster-wheelers, running the world ragged by optimising within constraints instead of finding ways to break out of those constraints entirely.
Snowden should run for President, or possibly better, vice-President. America needs heroes right now. Failing that, NSA Director would be a good outcome for everyone.
I am being deadly serious.
The better video is one of Job's earlier talks on the founding of Apple. Quite apart from the bespectacled, obviously geeky Jobs on display, a very striking aspect of the talk is Jobs' discussion of his visit to a local elementary school where he witnessed primary school students using computers. This event was one Jobs' continually referred back to later in his career, but this is probably first public discussion of the event which formed or else solidified his view that the PC industry could have/was having a profound impact on society. It's easy to see how someone could become evangelical about computers after being at the very coalface of such processes.
The opposing army casts "Anti-Drone defense technologies".
It's Super-Effective.
Made in China.
Designed in California.
Basically, Good and its employees are using vast company resources to min/max the rental market and ordinary residents end up bearing the resulting resulting rising costs.
Amen.
I am literally drowing in passwords. Over the last week, I've had to create at least a half dozen new user/password combinations. I doubt I'll ever use most of them again, but I don't want to use the same password or variations thereof on multiple sites.
At this point, the "Register" prompt is enough to send me screaming in horror away from sites. Maybe this is for the best.
I blame the nerds for driving everyone else out of certain fields with their naked and open hostility towards: women, minorities, political groups, windows users, console players, facebook users, sports fans, people who haven't read Ender's Game and those who display emotions outside of forums posts and D&D games.
This isn't a troll. I am seriously blaming nerds for being openly hostile to the wider adoption of Computer Science and programming. It's a problem and the sooner it is owned up to the sooner a solution can be found.