I think that misses the point somewhat. The purpose isn't to necessarily to prevent the recipient from having continued access to the information if they want it. The point is to prevent the recipient from leaving the message in their inbox out of carelessness.
It's not uncommon for someone's email account to be compromised, and then the attacker might have access to every email ever sent or received from the account. If you "expire" emails after some period of time, it lowers the risk that those emails will be compromised during that kind of attack.
Even if we all agree that we have an innate moral right to be able to say what we like, it still doesn't mean that reddit can't remove posts or block users. Because here's where it gets sticky: The owners of reddit should then also be considered to have the innate moral right to not promote or endorse speech. Therefore, your right to freedom of speech comes into conflict with reddit's right to freedom of speech.
And that's a big part of why we have a legal system. What happens when your rights and my rights come into conflict? We look at the laws, go through the courts, and end up with a set of rules for how those conflicts get hashed out.
For some reason there's a big misunderstanding about the "freedom of speech" going around. There seem to be a bunch of right-wing nutcases who think that their "freedom of speech" means that media outlets and websites are obligated to carry their conspiracy theories and hate-speech. They think that their "freedom of speech" obligates everyone in the world to listen and agree. They think that their "freedom of speech" extends to shouting down other arguments, while somehow also prohibiting others from shouting down their speech. They somehow even seem to think that their "freedom of speech" means that whatever they say gets to be true, and people are violating your rights if they simply disagree.
It doesn't work that way. You have the right to speak to your full capability, but I have no obligation to help you speak, condone your speech, host your speech, or listen to your speech. In fact, my freedom of speech enables me to speak against your speech, even if it's disruptive, even if it makes you look stupid. My freedom of speech allows me to tell you to shut up, that I don't want to listen to you. It enables me to walk away without listening. If I own the stage you're speaking on, I can tell you to get off of it because I don't like what you're saying.
Not only does your freedom of speech allow you to say what you want, but my freedom of speech allows me to not-promote your speech if I don't want.
Someone running a bakery should absolutely be able to refuse to write some particular message on their cake. And if someone comes into their bakery and starts picking fights with other customers, saying awful things, then the bakery should be able to ask them to leave.
But still, it shouldn't be legal to refuse to sell someone a wedding cake because he's black. Once that's allowed, it stops being a free-speech issue andbecomes about discrimination.
either the government forces all businesses to allow all legal speech, or the government allows all businesses to determine what speech they want to allow on businesses platform/cake.
Why? What makes you think it has to be all or nothing? Laws make all kinds of distinctions all the time. It's kind of like saying, "Either the government can prohibit you from firing a gun, or they can't prohibit you from firing a gun!" Why can't it be legal to fire a gun in some circumstances, and not legal in others? Why can't the legality depend on where the gun is pointed and why it's being fired?
As to the whole Hitler thing, it's too outrageous not to mention it, but it's too crazy to bother arguing with.
Whether you're talking about "free speech" as a legal concept or a moral concept, it only extends to your right to say something. You can say what you want. However, your right to say what you want doesn't mean other people should be forced to agree, or even listen. It doesn't mean that other people are obligated to promote your speech or provide you with a platform. It doesn't free you from the practical consequences of your speech.
If you post something on reddit, regardless of the content, I'm not obligated to read it. I'm not obligated to upvote it. Reddit, being a random privately owned website, is not barred from removing your post. And if your post upsets people, your right to free speech doesn't mean they're not allowed to be upset.
If you want to argue that Reddit is such an important website that them removing your post has the effect of silencing you in public discourse, then you could have some claim that they have some moral obligation to make sure their rules aren't oppressive. However, there would have to be some argument as to why reddit is particularly important. It's silly to argue that all websites are morally obligated to post the opinions of any person who wants a platform. If you run a private blog, and I want to submit a post that you find repugnant, are you obligated to post it?
Yeah, I think that when it's a quote like this, the correct punctuation is an em dash, not a colon. I'm not an expert, but I think that's what I see more often.
That's not "perfect security", that's preventing one attack vector. Can you set up a SQL database so that it's absolutely impossible for there to be any security breach whatsoever?
No, the way that I'm talking is based on having a basic understanding of how security really works.
I've seen a situation where, to improve security, a company installed a keypad and began rotating the pass code on a regular basis (I think it was once a month). The employees kept forgetting the latest password, and would get locked out. It was particularly annoying because the door was just another entrance to the office, didn't provide direct access to anything that needed high security, and you still had to pass though a heavily populated area to get deeper into the building. Out of frustration, they started propping the door open with a doorstop, and management didn't do anything about it because "it wasn't that big a deal anyway".
In another instance, a company tried to crack down on bad passwords by using what I believe was Microsoft's recommended practice at the time: Using Group Policies to enforce strong passwords, at least 8 characters long, including upper-case, lower-case, a number, and a symbol, forcing people to change the password every 45 days, and prohibiting reusing any of your last 14 passwords.
The employees were extremely frustrated until someone thought of a solution. They made their password "P@ssw0rd1". When they were prompted to change their password, they changed it to "P@ssw0rd2", then "P@ssw0rd3", going up to "P@ssw0rd14" before starting over. Whoever it was that thought to do that was so proud of their ingenuity that they told some of their coworkers, and before you knew it, half the people in the company were using the same convention, literally using "P@ssw0rd" each time. A couple of the IT guys even thought that was fine, since it met the technical requirements and must therefore be a "strong password".
To give another example I've seen more recently, a company wanted to safeguard their files by restricting sharing on their Dropbox accounts. They made it so you absolutely could not share documents with anyone outside of the company. Unfortunately, the reason they were using Dropbox in the first place was that they frequently needed to share files with people outside of the company. There was a lot of frustration and productivity loss among this company's employees, as well as some client relations mishaps, because they needed to share files but had no way to do it. It didn't take long for someone to come up with a solution: people started moving company files to their personal Dropbox accounts so they could share them.
All of these cases are simple, easy to understand examples of a phenomenon most amateurs ignore: Making your security "stronger" can weaken your security. If you make things too frustrating, people will find a way to bypass your restrictions. And even if they don't, even if you're successful in enforcing security, you end up with low morale and decreased productivity, the cost of which may be greater than the potential losses of a minor security breach.
Ok, I'd be fine with that, but then what's the rationale for making Windows Mail a part of the OS with no supported way of uninstalling it?
I mean, first there's the question of, why build it at all if it doesn't make financial sense? They could just point people to webmail, or include Thunderbird, or just assume that, by now, most people know how to deal with email on their own. Instead, they not only need to pre-install their klunky mail app with the OS, but they have to make it an app that comes pinned on both the start bar and task bar, that can't be uninstalled and can't be removed from the start menu.
If they're going to push so hard for you to use their app, then there must be some financial gain to it. If there's financial gain to it, then it should be worth investing enough to make it work properly. It's not like email is super complicated.
good security is not about making unauthorized access as difficult as possible, but about balancing the need to make unauthorized access difficult agains the need to make authorized access easy.
Good security is an ongoing process of evaluating your assets that may be a target of attack, as well as the likely attackers and then likely methods of attack, and then putting defenses in place that appropriately balance making authorized access easy and unauthorized access difficult. The "appropriate balance" should take into account things like the value of the target, the value of making authorized access easy, the likeliness of an attack, the sophistication of the likely attackers.
So for example, there's a lot of things that are considered "good" security that make both authorized and unauthorized access more difficult. However, you may have an asset that there's high value in making authorized access easy, while the asset is of little value to potential attackers and an attack is unlikely-- and even if there were a security breach, little would be lost. In such a case, those "good" security practices are actually bad because they're inappropriate for the context.
And actually, it's not just making unauthorized access "difficult", it's making also making it risky, unlikely to pay off, and making it more likely that a breach will be detected. Part of preventing a breach is to make the target unappealing.
Security is hard, and there is no one who knows how to have perfect security. That's an unsolved problem.
Well I wouldn't say it's an unsolved problem. I'm not sure the best way to put it, but "perfect security" is basically a false concept. It's not just that we haven't figured out how to do it or even that it's not realistically possible. It's more that... if you're thinking about "perfect security", then you're misunderstanding the concept of "security".
To think of it outside of the realm of computers, think about trying to make a "perfectly secure" house, where no uninvited guests can come in and you can't be harmed while in your house. There are some pretty obvious difficulties, like how do you make windows (and walls) that can't be broken or locks that can't be picked. And that's what people think of when they think about the difficulties with "perfect security".
But there are bigger and more fundamental problems. Thinking of the "locks that can't be picked", what happens if you lose your keys? People lose their keys all the time, and they want to be able to call a locksmith to let them back in. If the lock can't be picked, then the locksmith can't help you. If a window can't be broken, then you can't get back in that way. If the walls can't be knocked down, then you can't even demolish the house and start over. In a sense, by making your house impossible to break into, you're creating a big source of insecurity. If you mess up and lock yourself out, you've lost your house and everything in it. The effect is the same as if someone had broken in and stolen or destroyed everything you own.
In fact, there are always some kinds of trade-offs. The more you do to make it harder for an unauthorized person or object to enter your house, the more likely you'll also introduce a scenario where you will have difficulty accessing your house, or you'll prevent yourself from bringing in a person or object that you'd want in your house. Or, to approach the idea from another direction, if you want to be able to bring a friend home, you're also creating an opportunity for a "friend" with ill intent to enter your home. If you want to be able to bring a gun into your home to protect yourself, you're also bringing a weapon into your home that can be used against you.
But let's assume that you're content to have your home fully empty, and never bring a guest home. Now what happens if you wake up in the middle of the night having a heart attack? You can't get help. You call for an ambulance, but the EMT can't come in. Disallowing entrance to an uninvited EMT actually makes you less safe. You might respond, "Well, I'd come up with some security measure to allow a medical professional to enter my house," but then, how would you protect yourself from an EMT with ill intent? Or how do you prevent someone else from exploiting the system for allowing EMTs? How do you prevent a well-intentioned EMT from allowing something dangerous to enter your house?
I could go on, but the point is that this isn't a technical challenge of establishing "perfect security", this is a fundamental problem with the concept of "perfect security". The measures you take to make unauthorized access difficult will have the side effect of making authorized access more difficult. Trying to make unauthorized access impossible will eventually make authorized access impossible. Because of this, real security is not a single act of making unauthorized access possible, but rather an ongoing process of making unauthorized access difficult and risky.
Also, good security is not about making unauthorized access as difficult as possible, but about balancing the need to make unauthorized access difficult agains the need to make authorized access easy. If you require a complex procedure to unlock every door, then a lot of people will start leaving doors unlocked.
If Linux as a gaming platform was 150% better than Windows, then absolutely games on Linux could become a thing. But until then who really gives a fuck?
Listen, the reality is that an awful lot of people just don't care about the OS. The question largely boils down to, "Can I play the games I want to play with adequate performance?" If the answer is "yes", then they don't much care what OS they're running those games on.
And then a lot of people particularly want to avoid being locked in to crappy vendors. Microsoft and Sony both have a long history of screwing over their customers and their partners, and people would like to avoid being stuck with them. Windows 10 keeps getting worse and worse, and consoles don't provide a lot of options, so people would like some alternative, and Linux is an obvious choice.
But what I don't really understand is, why are you so angry about that?
Adobe *used* to favour Apple's platforms first and Windows would get a delayed release. Not only is that no longer the case... This saw a huge rise in PC use for content creation...
I've seen a few people comment on this, but I think that's a bit of a tortured interpretation of what happened. First, it should be no surprise that Adobe started focusing on Windows in the late 90s and early 2000s. Microsoft had won the OS wars, and Apple appeared to be a company in decline. Besides that, Adobe can (at times) be a shitty company that drags its feet whenever it might mean ceding their dominance or making investments in their products.
The reality is, this shouldn't be a controversial story. Processing power has become less of a consideration, as even the "lightweight" CPUs have become powerful enough for all but the most demanding applications. Apple's processor lineup has been making big gains. A lot of Apple developers are already writing code for Apple processors (on iOS). A lot of stuff already runs on ARM, and even Microsoft has been working on an ARM version of Windows. More and more, people use either mobile applications or web applications. Android phone makers have been experimenting with making docks that turn their phones into desktop computers. Google has been working on unifying ChromeOS and Android.
Of course Apple's at least experimenting with bringing their desktop OS to ARM. If anything, I'm suprised that there's not already an iPad Pro model that can run a full desktop environment when docked.
If Linux as a gaming platform was 150% better than Windows, then absolutely games on Linux could become a thing. But until then who really gives a fuck?
Listen, the reality is that an awful lot of people just don't care about the OS. The question largely boils down to, "Can I play the games I want to play with adequate performance?" If the answer is "yes", then they don't much care what OS they're running those games on.
And then a lot of people particularly want to avoid being locked in to crappy vendors. Microsoft and Sony both have a long history of screwing over their customers and their partners, and people would like to avoid being stuck with them. Windows 10 keeps getting worse and worse, and consoles don't provide a lot of options, so people would like some alternative, and Linux is an obvious choice.
But what I don't really understand is, why are you so angry about that? Here you are, yelling at people on the Internet because they'd like to be able to play video games on a platform that you don't use. What's your goal here?
I'm not sure it's relevant to the conversation, but I've never seen the value of a touchscreen on a laptop. It's one thing if it somehow turns into a tablet, but for real work, I'd much rather use the keyboard and touchpad than a touchscreen.
I'd see more value in a phone or tablet than can be docked and run as a full computer. I imagine the A11 chip is fast enough to do that, but it'd require that desktop apps are compiled to run on it. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the first step in this process, to enable developers to create Mac apps (appropriate for use with a keyboard and mouse) that run on Apple processors.
With the prospect of another processor switch and having to spend millions now to develop a code base for two different processor lines, I imagine many will simply drop Mac as a native platform all together.
I don't know if they're really going to switch processors, but if they do, I don't think they'll do it without developer buy-in and some serious upside. One of the possible benefits is that it puts all of their devices on the same platform. You could possibly have the same binaries on a MacBook and an iPad-- though you probably don't want the same UI on both.
Meh. In a sense, the web is all obfuscated anyway. When you put a link in a page, you don't see the URL. If you do see the URL, it's usually the domain name and not the IP. If you see the IP, there's no guarantee that there's no redirection going on. Even if you know the destination, by nature of the Internet you won't know the path your traffic takes and what might be happening with that traffic en route.
I know, I'm being nit-picky, but my point is that the Internet isn't designed to provide real clarity and transparency anyway. Adding a layer of URL shortening doesn't really make things that much worse.
Find someone Apple is selling this data to. Get back to us.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
In the abstract, you're right. However, if Apple wants to make money selling their user's data, then they have to make it public knowledge. If it's secret, then the people who want to buy the data won't know it's available. It's kind of like saying, prove to me that Apple isn't selling self-driving cars. Well, if they were, someone would know about it, or else they wouldn't be able to sell very many.
So in this case, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
You're thinking about it backwards. Microsoft isn't imagining that Linux needs Windows support. They want Windows to have Linux support.
If you want/need to run some Linux tool, they want to make it as easy as possible to run that on Windows. It's an added feature for Windows if it can run Linux stuff.
I just mean more simply, what's being measured here? Is that the percentage of people graduating from college with degrees in each field, by year? How is anyone supposed to derive any meaning from a chart where there's no context and the axes aren't labelled?
Sure. So now all we have to do is get people to use it. (...which includes fixing the problems that prevent people from finding it to be an adequate solution)
What does that chart even show? The Y axis is just labelled "percent".
Anyway, if you're studying art in college because you're looking for a financial ROI, you're probably going to be disappointed, but I'm not sure that's why people study those things.
If the "financial value" of your education drops to zero, at least you still have the education. If the price of bitcoin drops to zero (which is far from unthinkable), you've got jack squat.
And most of the situations described in the reference article describe poorly framed problems. I understand that it is supposed to be a jokey, light, non-serious, read. However it illustrates the problem with people asking the wrong question, or making incorrect assumptions.
I don't know if that's an entirely fair assessment. Part of the issue here is that it's not easy (perhaps impossible) to frame problems well so that there's no possibility of finding an unintended solution. For any of the the human problems that we want solutions to, there may be some mathematically viable solution that violates other practical considerations. It may "solve the problem" without actually solving the problem, and in fact making things worse.
And I don't think that idea is unimportant. It's a genuine danger in allowing AI the ability to act on its own. There may be unforeseen, perhaps even unforeseeable, failures to frame a problem properly, where the AI can't do something spectacularly stupid and unhelpful. Of course, that also has to be weighed against the tendency of people to do things that are spectacularly stupid and unhelpful when they're making the decisions.
I say it would be more practical to regulate Facebook.
I would guess this is what you mean, but I'm going to say it anyway: We shouldn't just regulate Facebook. We should establish regulation for privacy and appropriate use of private information for all companies, however it's gathered and through whatever medium. We should also invest in building out identity management systems and protocols that allow people to understand and control what information they're sharing with which companies, and what's being done with that information.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, I think you're missing the point. These services that send self-destructing emails aren't sending them unencrypted.
I think that misses the point somewhat. The purpose isn't to necessarily to prevent the recipient from having continued access to the information if they want it. The point is to prevent the recipient from leaving the message in their inbox out of carelessness.
It's not uncommon for someone's email account to be compromised, and then the attacker might have access to every email ever sent or received from the account. If you "expire" emails after some period of time, it lowers the risk that those emails will be compromised during that kind of attack.
Even if we all agree that we have an innate moral right to be able to say what we like, it still doesn't mean that reddit can't remove posts or block users. Because here's where it gets sticky: The owners of reddit should then also be considered to have the innate moral right to not promote or endorse speech. Therefore, your right to freedom of speech comes into conflict with reddit's right to freedom of speech.
And that's a big part of why we have a legal system. What happens when your rights and my rights come into conflict? We look at the laws, go through the courts, and end up with a set of rules for how those conflicts get hashed out.
For some reason there's a big misunderstanding about the "freedom of speech" going around. There seem to be a bunch of right-wing nutcases who think that their "freedom of speech" means that media outlets and websites are obligated to carry their conspiracy theories and hate-speech. They think that their "freedom of speech" obligates everyone in the world to listen and agree. They think that their "freedom of speech" extends to shouting down other arguments, while somehow also prohibiting others from shouting down their speech. They somehow even seem to think that their "freedom of speech" means that whatever they say gets to be true, and people are violating your rights if they simply disagree.
It doesn't work that way. You have the right to speak to your full capability, but I have no obligation to help you speak, condone your speech, host your speech, or listen to your speech. In fact, my freedom of speech enables me to speak against your speech, even if it's disruptive, even if it makes you look stupid. My freedom of speech allows me to tell you to shut up, that I don't want to listen to you. It enables me to walk away without listening. If I own the stage you're speaking on, I can tell you to get off of it because I don't like what you're saying.
Not only does your freedom of speech allow you to say what you want, but my freedom of speech allows me to not-promote your speech if I don't want.
You mean like a wedding cake?
Someone running a bakery should absolutely be able to refuse to write some particular message on their cake. And if someone comes into their bakery and starts picking fights with other customers, saying awful things, then the bakery should be able to ask them to leave.
But still, it shouldn't be legal to refuse to sell someone a wedding cake because he's black. Once that's allowed, it stops being a free-speech issue andbecomes about discrimination.
either the government forces all businesses to allow all legal speech, or the government allows all businesses to determine what speech they want to allow on businesses platform/cake.
Why? What makes you think it has to be all or nothing? Laws make all kinds of distinctions all the time. It's kind of like saying, "Either the government can prohibit you from firing a gun, or they can't prohibit you from firing a gun!" Why can't it be legal to fire a gun in some circumstances, and not legal in others? Why can't the legality depend on where the gun is pointed and why it's being fired?
As to the whole Hitler thing, it's too outrageous not to mention it, but it's too crazy to bother arguing with.
Whether you're talking about "free speech" as a legal concept or a moral concept, it only extends to your right to say something. You can say what you want. However, your right to say what you want doesn't mean other people should be forced to agree, or even listen. It doesn't mean that other people are obligated to promote your speech or provide you with a platform. It doesn't free you from the practical consequences of your speech.
If you post something on reddit, regardless of the content, I'm not obligated to read it. I'm not obligated to upvote it. Reddit, being a random privately owned website, is not barred from removing your post. And if your post upsets people, your right to free speech doesn't mean they're not allowed to be upset.
If you want to argue that Reddit is such an important website that them removing your post has the effect of silencing you in public discourse, then you could have some claim that they have some moral obligation to make sure their rules aren't oppressive. However, there would have to be some argument as to why reddit is particularly important. It's silly to argue that all websites are morally obligated to post the opinions of any person who wants a platform. If you run a private blog, and I want to submit a post that you find repugnant, are you obligated to post it?
Yeah, I think that when it's a quote like this, the correct punctuation is an em dash, not a colon. I'm not an expert, but I think that's what I see more often.
That's not "perfect security", that's preventing one attack vector. Can you set up a SQL database so that it's absolutely impossible for there to be any security breach whatsoever?
No, the way that I'm talking is based on having a basic understanding of how security really works.
I've seen a situation where, to improve security, a company installed a keypad and began rotating the pass code on a regular basis (I think it was once a month). The employees kept forgetting the latest password, and would get locked out. It was particularly annoying because the door was just another entrance to the office, didn't provide direct access to anything that needed high security, and you still had to pass though a heavily populated area to get deeper into the building. Out of frustration, they started propping the door open with a doorstop, and management didn't do anything about it because "it wasn't that big a deal anyway".
In another instance, a company tried to crack down on bad passwords by using what I believe was Microsoft's recommended practice at the time: Using Group Policies to enforce strong passwords, at least 8 characters long, including upper-case, lower-case, a number, and a symbol, forcing people to change the password every 45 days, and prohibiting reusing any of your last 14 passwords.
The employees were extremely frustrated until someone thought of a solution. They made their password "P@ssw0rd1". When they were prompted to change their password, they changed it to "P@ssw0rd2", then "P@ssw0rd3", going up to "P@ssw0rd14" before starting over. Whoever it was that thought to do that was so proud of their ingenuity that they told some of their coworkers, and before you knew it, half the people in the company were using the same convention, literally using "P@ssw0rd" each time. A couple of the IT guys even thought that was fine, since it met the technical requirements and must therefore be a "strong password".
To give another example I've seen more recently, a company wanted to safeguard their files by restricting sharing on their Dropbox accounts. They made it so you absolutely could not share documents with anyone outside of the company. Unfortunately, the reason they were using Dropbox in the first place was that they frequently needed to share files with people outside of the company. There was a lot of frustration and productivity loss among this company's employees, as well as some client relations mishaps, because they needed to share files but had no way to do it. It didn't take long for someone to come up with a solution: people started moving company files to their personal Dropbox accounts so they could share them.
All of these cases are simple, easy to understand examples of a phenomenon most amateurs ignore: Making your security "stronger" can weaken your security. If you make things too frustrating, people will find a way to bypass your restrictions. And even if they don't, even if you're successful in enforcing security, you end up with low morale and decreased productivity, the cost of which may be greater than the potential losses of a minor security breach.
Ok, I'd be fine with that, but then what's the rationale for making Windows Mail a part of the OS with no supported way of uninstalling it?
I mean, first there's the question of, why build it at all if it doesn't make financial sense? They could just point people to webmail, or include Thunderbird, or just assume that, by now, most people know how to deal with email on their own. Instead, they not only need to pre-install their klunky mail app with the OS, but they have to make it an app that comes pinned on both the start bar and task bar, that can't be uninstalled and can't be removed from the start menu.
If they're going to push so hard for you to use their app, then there must be some financial gain to it. If there's financial gain to it, then it should be worth investing enough to make it work properly. It's not like email is super complicated.
Well I did say:
good security is not about making unauthorized access as difficult as possible, but about balancing the need to make unauthorized access difficult agains the need to make authorized access easy.
Good security is an ongoing process of evaluating your assets that may be a target of attack, as well as the likely attackers and then likely methods of attack, and then putting defenses in place that appropriately balance making authorized access easy and unauthorized access difficult. The "appropriate balance" should take into account things like the value of the target, the value of making authorized access easy, the likeliness of an attack, the sophistication of the likely attackers.
So for example, there's a lot of things that are considered "good" security that make both authorized and unauthorized access more difficult. However, you may have an asset that there's high value in making authorized access easy, while the asset is of little value to potential attackers and an attack is unlikely-- and even if there were a security breach, little would be lost. In such a case, those "good" security practices are actually bad because they're inappropriate for the context.
And actually, it's not just making unauthorized access "difficult", it's making also making it risky, unlikely to pay off, and making it more likely that a breach will be detected. Part of preventing a breach is to make the target unappealing.
Security is hard, and there is no one who knows how to have perfect security. That's an unsolved problem.
Well I wouldn't say it's an unsolved problem. I'm not sure the best way to put it, but "perfect security" is basically a false concept. It's not just that we haven't figured out how to do it or even that it's not realistically possible. It's more that... if you're thinking about "perfect security", then you're misunderstanding the concept of "security".
To think of it outside of the realm of computers, think about trying to make a "perfectly secure" house, where no uninvited guests can come in and you can't be harmed while in your house. There are some pretty obvious difficulties, like how do you make windows (and walls) that can't be broken or locks that can't be picked. And that's what people think of when they think about the difficulties with "perfect security".
But there are bigger and more fundamental problems. Thinking of the "locks that can't be picked", what happens if you lose your keys? People lose their keys all the time, and they want to be able to call a locksmith to let them back in. If the lock can't be picked, then the locksmith can't help you. If a window can't be broken, then you can't get back in that way. If the walls can't be knocked down, then you can't even demolish the house and start over. In a sense, by making your house impossible to break into, you're creating a big source of insecurity. If you mess up and lock yourself out, you've lost your house and everything in it. The effect is the same as if someone had broken in and stolen or destroyed everything you own.
In fact, there are always some kinds of trade-offs. The more you do to make it harder for an unauthorized person or object to enter your house, the more likely you'll also introduce a scenario where you will have difficulty accessing your house, or you'll prevent yourself from bringing in a person or object that you'd want in your house. Or, to approach the idea from another direction, if you want to be able to bring a friend home, you're also creating an opportunity for a "friend" with ill intent to enter your home. If you want to be able to bring a gun into your home to protect yourself, you're also bringing a weapon into your home that can be used against you.
But let's assume that you're content to have your home fully empty, and never bring a guest home. Now what happens if you wake up in the middle of the night having a heart attack? You can't get help. You call for an ambulance, but the EMT can't come in. Disallowing entrance to an uninvited EMT actually makes you less safe. You might respond, "Well, I'd come up with some security measure to allow a medical professional to enter my house," but then, how would you protect yourself from an EMT with ill intent? Or how do you prevent someone else from exploiting the system for allowing EMTs? How do you prevent a well-intentioned EMT from allowing something dangerous to enter your house?
I could go on, but the point is that this isn't a technical challenge of establishing "perfect security", this is a fundamental problem with the concept of "perfect security". The measures you take to make unauthorized access difficult will have the side effect of making authorized access more difficult. Trying to make unauthorized access impossible will eventually make authorized access impossible. Because of this, real security is not a single act of making unauthorized access possible, but rather an ongoing process of making unauthorized access difficult and risky.
Also, good security is not about making unauthorized access as difficult as possible, but about balancing the need to make unauthorized access difficult agains the need to make authorized access easy. If you require a complex procedure to unlock every door, then a lot of people will start leaving doors unlocked.
If Linux as a gaming platform was 150% better than Windows, then absolutely games on Linux could become a thing. But until then who really gives a fuck?
Listen, the reality is that an awful lot of people just don't care about the OS. The question largely boils down to, "Can I play the games I want to play with adequate performance?" If the answer is "yes", then they don't much care what OS they're running those games on.
And then a lot of people particularly want to avoid being locked in to crappy vendors. Microsoft and Sony both have a long history of screwing over their customers and their partners, and people would like to avoid being stuck with them. Windows 10 keeps getting worse and worse, and consoles don't provide a lot of options, so people would like some alternative, and Linux is an obvious choice.
But what I don't really understand is, why are you so angry about that?
Adobe *used* to favour Apple's platforms first and Windows would get a delayed release. Not only is that no longer the case... This saw a huge rise in PC use for content creation...
I've seen a few people comment on this, but I think that's a bit of a tortured interpretation of what happened. First, it should be no surprise that Adobe started focusing on Windows in the late 90s and early 2000s. Microsoft had won the OS wars, and Apple appeared to be a company in decline. Besides that, Adobe can (at times) be a shitty company that drags its feet whenever it might mean ceding their dominance or making investments in their products.
The reality is, this shouldn't be a controversial story. Processing power has become less of a consideration, as even the "lightweight" CPUs have become powerful enough for all but the most demanding applications. Apple's processor lineup has been making big gains. A lot of Apple developers are already writing code for Apple processors (on iOS). A lot of stuff already runs on ARM, and even Microsoft has been working on an ARM version of Windows. More and more, people use either mobile applications or web applications. Android phone makers have been experimenting with making docks that turn their phones into desktop computers. Google has been working on unifying ChromeOS and Android.
Of course Apple's at least experimenting with bringing their desktop OS to ARM. If anything, I'm suprised that there's not already an iPad Pro model that can run a full desktop environment when docked.
If Linux as a gaming platform was 150% better than Windows, then absolutely games on Linux could become a thing. But until then who really gives a fuck?
Listen, the reality is that an awful lot of people just don't care about the OS. The question largely boils down to, "Can I play the games I want to play with adequate performance?" If the answer is "yes", then they don't much care what OS they're running those games on.
And then a lot of people particularly want to avoid being locked in to crappy vendors. Microsoft and Sony both have a long history of screwing over their customers and their partners, and people would like to avoid being stuck with them. Windows 10 keeps getting worse and worse, and consoles don't provide a lot of options, so people would like some alternative, and Linux is an obvious choice.
But what I don't really understand is, why are you so angry about that? Here you are, yelling at people on the Internet because they'd like to be able to play video games on a platform that you don't use. What's your goal here?
I'm not sure it's relevant to the conversation, but I've never seen the value of a touchscreen on a laptop. It's one thing if it somehow turns into a tablet, but for real work, I'd much rather use the keyboard and touchpad than a touchscreen.
I'd see more value in a phone or tablet than can be docked and run as a full computer. I imagine the A11 chip is fast enough to do that, but it'd require that desktop apps are compiled to run on it. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the first step in this process, to enable developers to create Mac apps (appropriate for use with a keyboard and mouse) that run on Apple processors.
With the prospect of another processor switch and having to spend millions now to develop a code base for two different processor lines, I imagine many will simply drop Mac as a native platform all together.
Right, because Adobe would never develop software to run on Apple's processors.
I don't know if they're really going to switch processors, but if they do, I don't think they'll do it without developer buy-in and some serious upside. One of the possible benefits is that it puts all of their devices on the same platform. You could possibly have the same binaries on a MacBook and an iPad-- though you probably don't want the same UI on both.
Meh. In a sense, the web is all obfuscated anyway. When you put a link in a page, you don't see the URL. If you do see the URL, it's usually the domain name and not the IP. If you see the IP, there's no guarantee that there's no redirection going on. Even if you know the destination, by nature of the Internet you won't know the path your traffic takes and what might be happening with that traffic en route.
I know, I'm being nit-picky, but my point is that the Internet isn't designed to provide real clarity and transparency anyway. Adding a layer of URL shortening doesn't really make things that much worse.
We didn't know about Cambridge Analytica specifically, but anyone paying attention could tell you that Facebook was selling access to its users' data.
Find someone Apple is selling this data to. Get back to us.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
In the abstract, you're right. However, if Apple wants to make money selling their user's data, then they have to make it public knowledge. If it's secret, then the people who want to buy the data won't know it's available. It's kind of like saying, prove to me that Apple isn't selling self-driving cars. Well, if they were, someone would know about it, or else they wouldn't be able to sell very many.
So in this case, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
You're thinking about it backwards. Microsoft isn't imagining that Linux needs Windows support. They want Windows to have Linux support.
If you want/need to run some Linux tool, they want to make it as easy as possible to run that on Windows. It's an added feature for Windows if it can run Linux stuff.
I just mean more simply, what's being measured here? Is that the percentage of people graduating from college with degrees in each field, by year? How is anyone supposed to derive any meaning from a chart where there's no context and the axes aren't labelled?
Sure. So now all we have to do is get people to use it. (...which includes fixing the problems that prevent people from finding it to be an adequate solution)
What does that chart even show? The Y axis is just labelled "percent".
Anyway, if you're studying art in college because you're looking for a financial ROI, you're probably going to be disappointed, but I'm not sure that's why people study those things.
If the "financial value" of your education drops to zero, at least you still have the education. If the price of bitcoin drops to zero (which is far from unthinkable), you've got jack squat.
And most of the situations described in the reference article describe poorly framed problems. I understand that it is supposed to be a jokey, light, non-serious, read. However it illustrates the problem with people asking the wrong question, or making incorrect assumptions.
I don't know if that's an entirely fair assessment. Part of the issue here is that it's not easy (perhaps impossible) to frame problems well so that there's no possibility of finding an unintended solution. For any of the the human problems that we want solutions to, there may be some mathematically viable solution that violates other practical considerations. It may "solve the problem" without actually solving the problem, and in fact making things worse.
And I don't think that idea is unimportant. It's a genuine danger in allowing AI the ability to act on its own. There may be unforeseen, perhaps even unforeseeable, failures to frame a problem properly, where the AI can't do something spectacularly stupid and unhelpful. Of course, that also has to be weighed against the tendency of people to do things that are spectacularly stupid and unhelpful when they're making the decisions.
I say it would be more practical to regulate Facebook.
I would guess this is what you mean, but I'm going to say it anyway: We shouldn't just regulate Facebook. We should establish regulation for privacy and appropriate use of private information for all companies, however it's gathered and through whatever medium. We should also invest in building out identity management systems and protocols that allow people to understand and control what information they're sharing with which companies, and what's being done with that information.