That said, the functionality that I've been hoping for pretty much since I heard about Bittorrent Sync is the ability to use this as a sort of distributed file system with a desired level of redundancy. So, for example, it be great if I could buy a bunch of consumer-level NAS devices with a few terabytes each, stash them in various places (friends and family's houses, wherever), and say, "I want every unit of information to be stored on at least 4 of the devices". Not necessarily 4, but however redundant you'd like it to be, based on your need for reliability and the reliability of your individual nodes.
If you could do that, then you could build your own scalable, redundant, reliable, fast Dropbox replacement on your own hardware without a single point of failure.
Yes, the "cloud" servers sometimes have outages. So do managed hosting providers. So do internal servers. And frankly, although every business thinks that what they're doing is super-important and they can't afford even the briefest outage, the fact is that most businesses can.
If Azure or AWS go down for an hour, it makes news and everyone freaks out because a lot of people are using them. If your business's server goes down for an hour, it does not make news, and people don't freak out. But for the business experiencing that 1 hour of downtime, what difference does it make whether they own the hardware or it's in "the cloud".
Yeah, but they didn't just vote against it, they filibustered it. Yet again, Republicans won't even allow a vote to take place, forcing people to get 60 votes to get anything done.
Well these things are rarely as simple as a laymen's understanding would lead you to believe, so we could both be completely off-base. Still, it's interesting to think about! I enjoy the reminder of how wacky our brains are.
Yeah, there was talk a while back of using DNSSEC as a method of authenticating self-signed certificates, which seemed to me to be a promising idea. I'm not sure if any progress was ever made.
I'm not an expert, but there is some part of your brain that specifically interprets faces. Maybe the information reached that part of the brain, but couldn't be processed beyond that.
Probably because, although you might think of Slashdot as a bastion of intellectuals and scientists, it's really a pop-culture news aggregation with nerd-centric marketing. Most people just want a summary, and don't want to read the actual paper.
And honestly, I'm in the camp that doesn't necessarily want to read the paper. I do recognize that there's a problem with journalists oversimplifying and mischaracterizing scientific ideas, but scientific papers are often written with the idea that you're versed in the particulars of the field being studied. I'd generally prefer to get the layman's explanation, and then dig into it more if I want to.
It seems like the best approach might be to include links to both the lay press summary and the actual papers.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. Like... I bet somewhere in that span of time, someone must have noticed this bundle and asked, "So what is this?" and someone else looked at a text book and said, "Oh, it must not be anything, really. It's not in the book. If it were anything important, it would be in the book." I wonder how many times that happened, and the people involved just moved along and forgot about the whole thing.
Now a doctor may correct me, and give good reasons why this wouldn't be noticeable in most circumstances. However, I like the idea of something like this being discovered as a lesson about how science historically works sometimes. Everyone has an idealized notion of science that it's just constant progress, and that things are all already known and analyzed, and the only things left to discover are very hard questions like, "what is the smallest fundamental particle, and how big a particle accelerator do we need to observe it?"
But you know, science moves forward through the effort of people, and people aren't perfect. Sometimes something gets lost. Sometimes something important gets disregarded. Sometimes science moves forward because someone isn't afraid of looking stupid, is willing to admit what he doesn't know, and says, "Hey, what is this?"
Well I meant something specific there, in that there are hacking schemes that consist of setting up public wifi specifically to capture unencrypted traffic. Just for example, if your local coffeeshop has a wifi network called "Coffee WiFi", then I can basically go sit in the coffeeshop with a mobile hotspot and my wifi and create a network with the same name. If I really want to be thorough, I might be able to locate their wireless device and pull the plug, and set the password on my network to be the same as theirs.
With a pretty simple setup, I can capture all the data coming through, but still pass the traffic through to the real sites on the Internet while storing all unencrypted traffic for any information that I might be interested in, as long as it's not using SSL. It's a pretty simple MITM (man-in-the-middle) attack.
Of course, it's possible to have a MITM attack anywhere, but it tends to be substantially more difficult elsewhere. Public WiFi is potentially very easy.
This actually seems pretty nice, especially if you're out-and-about and your cell phone dies (or if you don't have one, for whatever reason). I know I take my cell phone for granted, and it's scary how useless I can become if I don't have access to the Internet.
It does make me wonder, though, who is providing this gigabit Ethernet? It's a bit shocking how crappy the Internet in NYC can be, and I've seen businesses that are still stuck on DSL because they can't get FIOS, cable, or anything better than DSL without paying something like $1000/month. Maybe if they're stringing gigabit Ethernet throughout the city, they could go ahead and build the Infrastructure out so normal people could have decent Internet.
If you're using SSL, then the only thing that can be ascertained is which sites you visited, but not what you did on those sites or even what pages you viewed. I would advise being careful about any private information over the Internet without SSL anyway. If that's not satisfying, set up a VPN tunnel back to your home Internet connection, or pay for a VPN service, and then they can snoop all day and only know that you had an encrypted channel to some VPN endpoint. VPN is a good idea whenever using a public Internet service, since not all sites are encrypted and you don't really know who you're connecting to.
Hardly anyone I know under the age of 30 uses it unless they're foreign or looking for a new job. I doubt Facebook will have a problem with market penetration like the author of the linked article thinks they will.
So assuming what you're saying is right, it seems like Facebook will run into a completely different problem: they're fighting over a failing market. If nobody wants to use LinkedIn, then who's going to use Facebook's version of LinkedIn?
I just worry that all these Netflix wannabes is going to fracture the content market (with content being hopelessly split amongst competing streaming services thanks to a morass of exclusive deals).
I think that's the goal here. The content owners have had a sweet deal for years, making money from a lot of different angles. They got people to pay for cable, pay for HBO/Showtime, got them to buy DVDs, and got money from advertisments packed into each of these distribution channels (plus cross-promotional marketing and all kinds of other silliness). Now, after decades of figuring out every little spot they can pull money from, the market changes, and people's expectations change. At this point, people really want (and kind of expect) to be able to get all of their media from streaming, whenever and wherever they like. It totally screws up the business models for the content owners, and it destroys the business models for all the other distribution channels.
So these businesses have been getting clever on how to fight back. One of the methods is to hamper the Internet's ability to function as a distribution medium. They're in league with the ISPs, and both are working together to prevent anything resembling real competition in that market. Meanwhile, they've dragged their feet in providing real broadband internet, and they've fought against net neutrality, and they've choked the distribution points that would allow digital media from being reliable (e.g. the Netflix/Verizon kerfuffle).
One of the other pieces of their strategy is to prevent any company from being able to provide anything resembling a "complete library" of TV shows or movies. Each media company splits their library. They give some things to Netflix, some things to Hulu, some things to Amazon, some things to Crackle... etc. They might provide most of the same content to both Netflix and Amazon, for example, but they make sure to provide each with exclusive content, so that if you want to be able to watch whatever you want to watch, you need to pay for both. So while having a "decently sized library" will cost you $9/month, getting "something close to a complete library" will cost $100/month (or whatever the number is) because you have to sign up for several different services. And then, even then, they'll hold back some high-demand content (e.g. Game of Thrones) so that you still need to get cable and premium services to watch what you want to watch. This serves two basic functions: (a) It makes cord-cutting more frustrating, since you can't rely on any set of services to have all the content you want; and (b) it milks extra money from consumers.
And don't think for a second that it's accidental. All this stuff is part of a coherent strategy on the part of a cartel that includes the media companies who own/produce the content and the ISPs and cable companies that distribute it.
However, with the "exclusive content" stuff specifically, there is an additional contributing factor. A lot of the people who rise to positions of power in many companies are from marketing and sales. Marketing people need to justify their existence, which means that they have to come up with clever ideas and special promotions, and bla bla bla. Some of this stuff is clever. Some of it is even kind of nice for consumers. However, for the lazy marketing person, the easiest thing to do these days seems to be to develop a cross-promotional deal of some kind, or exclusive rights for some distribution channel. A lot of times, these deals are stupid and a waste of time. They don't necessarily lead to an increase in sales for anyone, but nobody cares because it's just the stuff that marketing people do, and marketing people run the world. But then also, things like "exclusive rights" can be leverage for getting other concessions, e.g. "We'll give you exclusive rights to this big hit movie, but in return, you agree to..." whatever.
There may be some way to actually clear up the whole situation, and that's probably going to be the best solution. It will probably also be free.
However, failing that, one solution comes to mind which is pretty obvious and very likely to solve your problem. Unfortunately, it's not free, but if you're running a business, it may be of benefit.
The suggestion is: get a smart-host. Essentially, it's a service where you route your email through an email provider first, and then they send it out. You can also set your MX records to direct incoming traffic to the smart-host, which can serve the purpose of a backup MX record (in case your server goes offline). Also, they'll often do spam filtering on their end, which means a lot of spam (and the associated traffic) never gets to your network. Sometimes they'll even offer email archiving, if you're interested in that.
Of course, if you're going to go with a smart host, it raises the question: does it make more sense to just go with a fully hosted solution? Office 365 and Google Apps are both pretty compelling solutions. I assume you're not interested in that, though, since you seem to want to keep your email onsite.
Believe me, I understand the problem, but I would suggest that the problem might not be quite where you think it is.
For example, someone who is a competent manager might have developed a process for sorting out issues that are beyond their technical expertise. They might choose someone from among the techies to serve as an adviser, or choose a technical lead who is capable of making those decisions, and delegating those decisions outright. They could round up the senior techs and have them vote on it.
Or honestly, they could ask you to present your arguments, and judge based on the information that they can gather from people who understand it better. I've had plenty of bosses do this pretty successfully. They see that there's a technical disagreement, and they ask each side to explain what the consequences are. When you reframe the question from, "Which technical decision is better?" to "What are the consequences to our business of one technical decision vs. another?" then you don't need to be a technical genius to make the decision. You just need to understand your business needs.
And if it turns into a popularity contest, then that's a failure of management, and not technical incompetence.
quite regularly, those things that "everybody knows" turn out to be not actually true.
Yes, and this is why we bother to study things. If you could go back in time a few hundred years, you'd find that already "everybody knows" how the world works, more or less, and they'd be wrong about a lot of it.
In fact, I don't even think this is necessarily what I'd expect. Yes, of course your boss's competence would have some relationship with your job satisfaction, but this goes much farther: "your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being"
That's quite a statement. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm not sure I buy it. There are multiple things about this statement that give me pause. For one thing, there's the issue of it being a predictor for your total well-being, and not just job satisfaction. I can see how that could be, since our jobs are such a huge part of most of our lives, but it's still a bit surprising. Second, that it's the strongest predictor, which means that if you search through all kinds of things in a person's life-- marriage, family, education level, wealth, body fat percentage, serotonin levels-- you can best predict a person's total well-being by looking at their boss. That's quite a claim. Finally, it stands out that they're indicating the problem is "technical" competence. I'm not even sure what that means, but I suspect the implication is something like, "General competence as a worker or a manager aren't an indicator. It's an issue of technical competence in your particular field."
Further, one of my immediate questions when reading this was, "Is it that having an incompetent boss makes you unhappy, or that being unhappy makes you more likely to rate your boss as incompetent?" I read enough of the paper to see that they anticipated this and attempted to rule out the latter possibility.
That assumes that any of these ISPs are competing with each other. It's a cartel. I'm sure Comcast and AT&T have an agreement, however explicit, to have each others' backs against any form of government regulation that would force net neutrality.
Yeah, it's hard to see this as anything other than a threat, that if the government doesn't do what AT&T wants, they might just take their ball and go home. I can see how someone would think this is fair, in the sense that businesses can't make good decisions without knowing what "the rules" are, but at the same time, you can only take that so far.
It seems like businesses and rich people are constantly pulling this act. "I'm afraid that if you tax me at all, I'll just have to pull all my money and business out of the country and operate someplace where they don't have taxes." or "Well, we can't have laws barring us from acting immorally and unethically. If we can't be completely unfettered, then we can't get anything done and our business will fail!" At some point, I think we just have to say, "Sorry, but we can't just let you do whatever you want with no boundaries. The reality is, we all operate within constraints, and we all have to cope with an uncertain future. If you can't operate with fair and honest business practices within a framework that allows our society to grow in a healthy direction, then we'll find someone else to fill your shoes." I mean, really, AT&T doesn't see the benefit in growing and upgrading their network? Fine, let's rip their network out and replace it with public infrastructure. I suspect that if those were the options, AT&T would find that it could manage to upgrade their network while operating within the principles of net neutrality.
While that may be part of it, another part is that doing "white people stuff" means you are not doing black people stuff and hence are not black enough...
Yeah, but that's kind of an empty explanation. I think it only raises the question, how is the decision made about which behavior is "not black enough" and why do people care? I suspect that there's an understanding bundled into the whole thing that "You're trying to emulate a group that will not truly accept you and that you can never really become a part of, and whenever someone from our group tries to emulate that group anyway, it's just another humiliation for our group."
I can't claim to really know, but it seems to me that there's something like that going on. I think that if more black people perceived a way to engage in "white people stuff" on their own terms, without sacrificing their identity or humiliating themselves, the aversion would be diminished.
I almost agree with you. I can say that I've worked for a few different IT companies, and in the IT departments of a few more companies, and I would say that every one of these companies has, at some point, actively looked for female and minority tech workers for the sake of diversity. That said, I've worked with very few black IT people, and I think I've only worked with one woman-- a database admin. It wasn't the result of an unwillingness to hire black people or women, but an inability to find candidates.
That said, I don't doubt that there are some racist employers out there still. I don't doubt that there are people who subtly treat black coworkers differently, or that job interviews are sometimes influenced by race, often even if people are not consciously aware that it's happening. I can't even claim that race never influences me unconsciously, since... well, it's unconscious. How would I know? I try to be fair and open-minded, and I grew up with a lot of minorities. I don't think I'm particularly racist, but I'm not sure any of us can avoid it completely.
I don't know how to fix it, but I don't think we can claim to have done away with racism. It comes in subtle forms-- For example, you might see a bunch of white kids failing in school, and maybe your first impulse would be to blame the school or teachers for not providing the right environment. Paint the same picture with different colors, and suddenly your first impulse is to assume that the kids and parents are to blame. It doesn't need to be a conscious, thought out decision to be racist. Sometimes, it's just a matter of which conclusions we jump to.
It is also a perception issue where we somehow think Outcome=Opportunity... They think I am why they never succeed, but it's really because they never tried.
Even if we accept this, it only raises the question, why doesn't outcome work out to be, over the long run, analogous to opportunity? I'm not asking, "why doesn't every single kid succeed equally," but if you have a bunch of kids and we suppose all of them have the same opportunities, why don't we an average success rate among different groups? Or even if we accept your analysis, that they "never tried", then why aren't they trying?
I feel a twinge of something in your explanation, which is a sort of understanding of the world that I hear people express often. It assumes a just world, that people who don't succeed are either inherently inferior, or not trying. Further, it offers no explanation as to why people wouldn't try, other than something like, "They're just not the sort of people who work hard," again implying idea that lack of economic success is simply a function of being inherently inferior. The explanation treats it as though it's simply a function of laziness and stupidity, neither of which have explanations, neither of which can be helped.
But it doesn't jibe with any of my experience of how people work. People are "lazy" when they're asked to do things that they don't see as benefiting them, or they're put into circumstance where they don't anticipate success. Contrary to the narrative we hear in some pockets of the media, it's not tons of fun being poor and on welfare. I doubt the kids you grew up with were intentionally choosing that because the perceived a bright future for themselves, but thought welfare would be more fun.
So all of this just raises the question, what's really going on here? Why are these kids feeling demotivated and disinterested in improving their own lives? Whether or not there had been a lot of opportunity for those kids, I suspect they didn't believe that there was. I would suspect that they had received a lot of messages in their lives, from whatever, sources, saying that college was not for them, not something they could do, not something that they would be successful at, and not something that would provide them with a better future. And whether the sources of those messages were from white people or black people, the messages themselves are bound up in a whole culture of racism.
if we got rid of all the abusers and the sites that thrive on them, what is left is actually the 1% or so that is worht spending time and money on - the part that was the actual, original purpose of the internet.
Let's not talk about the "original purpose of the Internet" like it's some ideology that we need to stick to. It was come up with by different people with different goals, several decades ago, without any real understanding of what it would become.
There's a bigger problem though. What's being talked about is censoring anyone who someone-- it's not clear who will be the judge of this nice little utopia-- decides that their contributions are counter-productive or inappropriate. That sure sounds nice, since nobody likes inappropriate and counter-productive comments. Unfortunately, there isn't always complete agreement about which comments those are. However, once you start shutting people out of the conversation based on rules as vague as "they said something that I think is offensive, abusive, annoying, or counter-productive," it has a chilling effect on the rest of the conversation. Since it's unclear what will get you into trouble, any intelligent person will hold things back for fear of reprisal.
In fact, there's a great irony here, in that the complaint is that women don't feel comfortable voicing their opinions for fear of reprisal, and the proposed solution is to develop a way to bring reprisal to anyone who is determined-- by an unspecified judge-- to have said something offensive.
In reality, the Internet is already pretty good at dealing with these people. There are moderation systems on many websites which hide inflammatory comments. We all have the option to refuse to visit websites that lack moderation, but we also have the option to visit them. Say what you will about 4chan being a bunch of awful misogynistic trolls, but there's a lot of creativity that comes from that awfulness. I think you'll find that if you were to succeed in cleaning up all of the inappropriate and unfortunate stupidity that happens on the Internet, you'll lose a lot of those comments that you feel are part of the worthwhile 1%.
I don't actually know what the numbers are, but I suspect that not all black people are "urban". Also-- again, I'm not really an expert-- but I suspect part of the aversion to doing "white people stuff" (where that aversion exists) is the result of disbelief at the prospect of actually becoming accepted among white people. In other words, the reason some black people might discourage education (and be discouraged from trying to become educated) is that they don't really expect that they can enter into the world of "white America" and be successful and accepted.
It's like, Imagine someone told you, "All the billionaires in the world wear these funny clothes, speak in this particular dialect (a dialect which sounds really lame), and memorize obscure 18th-century poetry. If you make a jackass out of yourself trying to do these things, you'll be just like the billionaires, and then they'll make you a billionaire too!" You'd think that sounded like some silly nonsense, and you wouldn't bother trying to do it.
It is the author of this silly article who cannot tell the difference between (threats of) rape and offensive statements...
I feel like I'm missing something important going on right now, because it has seemed to me that this sort of confusion is becoming more and more prevalent, and I'm not sure what the cause is. I've seen lots of posts on sites like Facebook, and many posts in my Facebook feeds, that seem to conflate "things that women aren't happy about," with "systematic political oppression of women," and "physical violence and rape."
I got into a brief Facebook discussion with a friend who was complaining about the whole "not all men" thing. If you haven't heard about this, a little while back there was a bunch of complaints that when women discussed the problematic things that men did, some men would say "not all men do that," and the complaint was that these men were 'derailing the conversation." For example, you would see a discussion about how men won't tolerate women in a position of power, to which some unfortunate man would say, "Well some men will. I would." and he would get yelled at for derailing the conversation.
So this whole concept was brought up, and I thought, "Ok, I can understand why am man would want to interject that, but I can also understand some of the frustration being expressed, since these women know that 'not all men' do terrible things, because they're talking about trends, and not every individual case. Interjecting with an individual case seems to minimize the complaint, so that interjection is not welcome. I can understand that." But then the conversation went on.
One friend went on to say, "No, we're not just talking about trends. We're talking about what normally happens. Men won't hire women. Men won't pay women the same respect that they'll pay to another man. Men engage in violence towards women, and men rape women." At that point, I felt a bit ambushed. I'd just been warned that I wasn't allowed to point out that "not all men" do these terrible things, but shortly afterwards I was told that the "normal thing" was for men to rape women. It seemed pretty important to note that no, not all men rape women. It's not even the "normal thing" or really a trend. To my understanding, a large percentage of rapists are men, but that's not the same as saying a large percentage of men are rapists.
But these activists are unwilling to make that kind of distinction. In subsequent conversations that I've had, I've been told, for example, that men shouldn't "hit on women" because it was aggressive and made women uncomfortable, which supposedly makes it a form of rape. That's right, any behavior that made women feel uncomfortable was a form of rape. So I asked for clarification on what constituted "hitting on women", since obviously it can't be rape to approach a woman, pay attention to her, or attempt to talk to her. I was told that the distinction was whether the attention was "welcome". If a woman doesn't welcome the attention, then the activity is essentially the same as rape.
Now, I don't want to set up a straw man argument here. I'm not saying that women don't have valid concerns. They do. There are many unfortunate things that happen to women, and I'd welcome a discussion of how to resolve those things. However, reasonable distinctions need to be made. Not everything can be "rape" and "oppression". The fact that I might unintentionally benefit from being a man, e.g. getting paid more than a female coworker, does not make me an active oppressor of women, does not make me a perpetrator of violence, and it does not make me a rapist. Until I feel like I can get some agreement on that, at least from people that I know personally in IRL, I feel like these kinds of conversations are hopelessly muddled and we can't do anything to address any problems.
Yeah, I haven't been tracking the GamerGate thing, and I don't know what to think at this point. AFAIK, on the one hand, you have a bunch of people saying, "Journalists are corrupt, and they're very good at hiding this by claiming that their critics are just misogynists." On the other hand, you have a bunch of journalists claiming, "That's just some nonsense some 4chan guys came up with, and their accusations of corruption have no evidence. This is just a clever 4chan harassment campaign."
On the one hand, I totally believe that journalists are corrupt. On the other hand, I also believe that 4chan people are possible of some clever, fucked up, subversive things. Weighing it all out, just by watching the arguments and who seems more rational, I'm inclined to believe the GamerGate people. Their critics seem to be part of some weird neo-feminist campaign on the Internet right now to paint all women as victims, and all men as victimizers. People (myself included) are afraid to present opposing arguments, because any opposition is categorized as an endorsement of violence against women.
If this is a 4chan prank, then it's a bit surprising that the prank is so convincing and has gone on for so long. If it's not a prank, well then it's all a frightening little bit of censorship. Their complaint is that journalists cover their corruption by accusing any critics of being misogynists, and the response from journalists is to paint them as misogynists.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, the functionality that I've been hoping for pretty much since I heard about Bittorrent Sync is the ability to use this as a sort of distributed file system with a desired level of redundancy. So, for example, it be great if I could buy a bunch of consumer-level NAS devices with a few terabytes each, stash them in various places (friends and family's houses, wherever), and say, "I want every unit of information to be stored on at least 4 of the devices". Not necessarily 4, but however redundant you'd like it to be, based on your need for reliability and the reliability of your individual nodes.
If you could do that, then you could build your own scalable, redundant, reliable, fast Dropbox replacement on your own hardware without a single point of failure.
Yes, the "cloud" servers sometimes have outages. So do managed hosting providers. So do internal servers. And frankly, although every business thinks that what they're doing is super-important and they can't afford even the briefest outage, the fact is that most businesses can.
If Azure or AWS go down for an hour, it makes news and everyone freaks out because a lot of people are using them. If your business's server goes down for an hour, it does not make news, and people don't freak out. But for the business experiencing that 1 hour of downtime, what difference does it make whether they own the hardware or it's in "the cloud".
Yeah, but they didn't just vote against it, they filibustered it. Yet again, Republicans won't even allow a vote to take place, forcing people to get 60 votes to get anything done.
Well these things are rarely as simple as a laymen's understanding would lead you to believe, so we could both be completely off-base. Still, it's interesting to think about! I enjoy the reminder of how wacky our brains are.
Yeah, there was talk a while back of using DNSSEC as a method of authenticating self-signed certificates, which seemed to me to be a promising idea. I'm not sure if any progress was ever made.
I'm not an expert, but there is some part of your brain that specifically interprets faces. Maybe the information reached that part of the brain, but couldn't be processed beyond that.
Probably because, although you might think of Slashdot as a bastion of intellectuals and scientists, it's really a pop-culture news aggregation with nerd-centric marketing. Most people just want a summary, and don't want to read the actual paper.
And honestly, I'm in the camp that doesn't necessarily want to read the paper. I do recognize that there's a problem with journalists oversimplifying and mischaracterizing scientific ideas, but scientific papers are often written with the idea that you're versed in the particulars of the field being studied. I'd generally prefer to get the layman's explanation, and then dig into it more if I want to.
It seems like the best approach might be to include links to both the lay press summary and the actual papers.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. Like... I bet somewhere in that span of time, someone must have noticed this bundle and asked, "So what is this?" and someone else looked at a text book and said, "Oh, it must not be anything, really. It's not in the book. If it were anything important, it would be in the book." I wonder how many times that happened, and the people involved just moved along and forgot about the whole thing.
Now a doctor may correct me, and give good reasons why this wouldn't be noticeable in most circumstances. However, I like the idea of something like this being discovered as a lesson about how science historically works sometimes. Everyone has an idealized notion of science that it's just constant progress, and that things are all already known and analyzed, and the only things left to discover are very hard questions like, "what is the smallest fundamental particle, and how big a particle accelerator do we need to observe it?"
But you know, science moves forward through the effort of people, and people aren't perfect. Sometimes something gets lost. Sometimes something important gets disregarded. Sometimes science moves forward because someone isn't afraid of looking stupid, is willing to admit what he doesn't know, and says, "Hey, what is this?"
Well I meant something specific there, in that there are hacking schemes that consist of setting up public wifi specifically to capture unencrypted traffic. Just for example, if your local coffeeshop has a wifi network called "Coffee WiFi", then I can basically go sit in the coffeeshop with a mobile hotspot and my wifi and create a network with the same name. If I really want to be thorough, I might be able to locate their wireless device and pull the plug, and set the password on my network to be the same as theirs.
With a pretty simple setup, I can capture all the data coming through, but still pass the traffic through to the real sites on the Internet while storing all unencrypted traffic for any information that I might be interested in, as long as it's not using SSL. It's a pretty simple MITM (man-in-the-middle) attack.
Of course, it's possible to have a MITM attack anywhere, but it tends to be substantially more difficult elsewhere. Public WiFi is potentially very easy.
This actually seems pretty nice, especially if you're out-and-about and your cell phone dies (or if you don't have one, for whatever reason). I know I take my cell phone for granted, and it's scary how useless I can become if I don't have access to the Internet.
It does make me wonder, though, who is providing this gigabit Ethernet? It's a bit shocking how crappy the Internet in NYC can be, and I've seen businesses that are still stuck on DSL because they can't get FIOS, cable, or anything better than DSL without paying something like $1000/month. Maybe if they're stringing gigabit Ethernet throughout the city, they could go ahead and build the Infrastructure out so normal people could have decent Internet.
If you're using SSL, then the only thing that can be ascertained is which sites you visited, but not what you did on those sites or even what pages you viewed. I would advise being careful about any private information over the Internet without SSL anyway. If that's not satisfying, set up a VPN tunnel back to your home Internet connection, or pay for a VPN service, and then they can snoop all day and only know that you had an encrypted channel to some VPN endpoint. VPN is a good idea whenever using a public Internet service, since not all sites are encrypted and you don't really know who you're connecting to.
Hardly anyone I know under the age of 30 uses it unless they're foreign or looking for a new job. I doubt Facebook will have a problem with market penetration like the author of the linked article thinks they will.
So assuming what you're saying is right, it seems like Facebook will run into a completely different problem: they're fighting over a failing market. If nobody wants to use LinkedIn, then who's going to use Facebook's version of LinkedIn?
I just worry that all these Netflix wannabes is going to fracture the content market (with content being hopelessly split amongst competing streaming services thanks to a morass of exclusive deals).
I think that's the goal here. The content owners have had a sweet deal for years, making money from a lot of different angles. They got people to pay for cable, pay for HBO/Showtime, got them to buy DVDs, and got money from advertisments packed into each of these distribution channels (plus cross-promotional marketing and all kinds of other silliness). Now, after decades of figuring out every little spot they can pull money from, the market changes, and people's expectations change. At this point, people really want (and kind of expect) to be able to get all of their media from streaming, whenever and wherever they like. It totally screws up the business models for the content owners, and it destroys the business models for all the other distribution channels.
So these businesses have been getting clever on how to fight back. One of the methods is to hamper the Internet's ability to function as a distribution medium. They're in league with the ISPs, and both are working together to prevent anything resembling real competition in that market. Meanwhile, they've dragged their feet in providing real broadband internet, and they've fought against net neutrality, and they've choked the distribution points that would allow digital media from being reliable (e.g. the Netflix/Verizon kerfuffle).
One of the other pieces of their strategy is to prevent any company from being able to provide anything resembling a "complete library" of TV shows or movies. Each media company splits their library. They give some things to Netflix, some things to Hulu, some things to Amazon, some things to Crackle... etc. They might provide most of the same content to both Netflix and Amazon, for example, but they make sure to provide each with exclusive content, so that if you want to be able to watch whatever you want to watch, you need to pay for both. So while having a "decently sized library" will cost you $9/month, getting "something close to a complete library" will cost $100/month (or whatever the number is) because you have to sign up for several different services. And then, even then, they'll hold back some high-demand content (e.g. Game of Thrones) so that you still need to get cable and premium services to watch what you want to watch. This serves two basic functions: (a) It makes cord-cutting more frustrating, since you can't rely on any set of services to have all the content you want; and (b) it milks extra money from consumers.
And don't think for a second that it's accidental. All this stuff is part of a coherent strategy on the part of a cartel that includes the media companies who own/produce the content and the ISPs and cable companies that distribute it.
However, with the "exclusive content" stuff specifically, there is an additional contributing factor. A lot of the people who rise to positions of power in many companies are from marketing and sales. Marketing people need to justify their existence, which means that they have to come up with clever ideas and special promotions, and bla bla bla. Some of this stuff is clever. Some of it is even kind of nice for consumers. However, for the lazy marketing person, the easiest thing to do these days seems to be to develop a cross-promotional deal of some kind, or exclusive rights for some distribution channel. A lot of times, these deals are stupid and a waste of time. They don't necessarily lead to an increase in sales for anyone, but nobody cares because it's just the stuff that marketing people do, and marketing people run the world. But then also, things like "exclusive rights" can be leverage for getting other concessions, e.g. "We'll give you exclusive rights to this big hit movie, but in return, you agree to..." whatever.
There may be some way to actually clear up the whole situation, and that's probably going to be the best solution. It will probably also be free.
However, failing that, one solution comes to mind which is pretty obvious and very likely to solve your problem. Unfortunately, it's not free, but if you're running a business, it may be of benefit.
The suggestion is: get a smart-host. Essentially, it's a service where you route your email through an email provider first, and then they send it out. You can also set your MX records to direct incoming traffic to the smart-host, which can serve the purpose of a backup MX record (in case your server goes offline). Also, they'll often do spam filtering on their end, which means a lot of spam (and the associated traffic) never gets to your network. Sometimes they'll even offer email archiving, if you're interested in that.
Of course, if you're going to go with a smart host, it raises the question: does it make more sense to just go with a fully hosted solution? Office 365 and Google Apps are both pretty compelling solutions. I assume you're not interested in that, though, since you seem to want to keep your email onsite.
Believe me, I understand the problem, but I would suggest that the problem might not be quite where you think it is.
For example, someone who is a competent manager might have developed a process for sorting out issues that are beyond their technical expertise. They might choose someone from among the techies to serve as an adviser, or choose a technical lead who is capable of making those decisions, and delegating those decisions outright. They could round up the senior techs and have them vote on it.
Or honestly, they could ask you to present your arguments, and judge based on the information that they can gather from people who understand it better. I've had plenty of bosses do this pretty successfully. They see that there's a technical disagreement, and they ask each side to explain what the consequences are. When you reframe the question from, "Which technical decision is better?" to "What are the consequences to our business of one technical decision vs. another?" then you don't need to be a technical genius to make the decision. You just need to understand your business needs.
And if it turns into a popularity contest, then that's a failure of management, and not technical incompetence.
quite regularly, those things that "everybody knows" turn out to be not actually true.
Yes, and this is why we bother to study things. If you could go back in time a few hundred years, you'd find that already "everybody knows" how the world works, more or less, and they'd be wrong about a lot of it.
In fact, I don't even think this is necessarily what I'd expect. Yes, of course your boss's competence would have some relationship with your job satisfaction, but this goes much farther: "your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being"
That's quite a statement. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm not sure I buy it. There are multiple things about this statement that give me pause. For one thing, there's the issue of it being a predictor for your total well-being, and not just job satisfaction. I can see how that could be, since our jobs are such a huge part of most of our lives, but it's still a bit surprising. Second, that it's the strongest predictor, which means that if you search through all kinds of things in a person's life-- marriage, family, education level, wealth, body fat percentage, serotonin levels-- you can best predict a person's total well-being by looking at their boss. That's quite a claim. Finally, it stands out that they're indicating the problem is "technical" competence. I'm not even sure what that means, but I suspect the implication is something like, "General competence as a worker or a manager aren't an indicator. It's an issue of technical competence in your particular field."
Further, one of my immediate questions when reading this was, "Is it that having an incompetent boss makes you unhappy, or that being unhappy makes you more likely to rate your boss as incompetent?" I read enough of the paper to see that they anticipated this and attempted to rule out the latter possibility.
That assumes that any of these ISPs are competing with each other. It's a cartel. I'm sure Comcast and AT&T have an agreement, however explicit, to have each others' backs against any form of government regulation that would force net neutrality.
Yeah, it's hard to see this as anything other than a threat, that if the government doesn't do what AT&T wants, they might just take their ball and go home. I can see how someone would think this is fair, in the sense that businesses can't make good decisions without knowing what "the rules" are, but at the same time, you can only take that so far.
It seems like businesses and rich people are constantly pulling this act. "I'm afraid that if you tax me at all, I'll just have to pull all my money and business out of the country and operate someplace where they don't have taxes." or "Well, we can't have laws barring us from acting immorally and unethically. If we can't be completely unfettered, then we can't get anything done and our business will fail!" At some point, I think we just have to say, "Sorry, but we can't just let you do whatever you want with no boundaries. The reality is, we all operate within constraints, and we all have to cope with an uncertain future. If you can't operate with fair and honest business practices within a framework that allows our society to grow in a healthy direction, then we'll find someone else to fill your shoes." I mean, really, AT&T doesn't see the benefit in growing and upgrading their network? Fine, let's rip their network out and replace it with public infrastructure. I suspect that if those were the options, AT&T would find that it could manage to upgrade their network while operating within the principles of net neutrality.
While that may be part of it, another part is that doing "white people stuff" means you are not doing black people stuff and hence are not black enough...
Yeah, but that's kind of an empty explanation. I think it only raises the question, how is the decision made about which behavior is "not black enough" and why do people care? I suspect that there's an understanding bundled into the whole thing that "You're trying to emulate a group that will not truly accept you and that you can never really become a part of, and whenever someone from our group tries to emulate that group anyway, it's just another humiliation for our group."
I can't claim to really know, but it seems to me that there's something like that going on. I think that if more black people perceived a way to engage in "white people stuff" on their own terms, without sacrificing their identity or humiliating themselves, the aversion would be diminished.
I almost agree with you. I can say that I've worked for a few different IT companies, and in the IT departments of a few more companies, and I would say that every one of these companies has, at some point, actively looked for female and minority tech workers for the sake of diversity. That said, I've worked with very few black IT people, and I think I've only worked with one woman-- a database admin. It wasn't the result of an unwillingness to hire black people or women, but an inability to find candidates.
That said, I don't doubt that there are some racist employers out there still. I don't doubt that there are people who subtly treat black coworkers differently, or that job interviews are sometimes influenced by race, often even if people are not consciously aware that it's happening. I can't even claim that race never influences me unconsciously, since... well, it's unconscious. How would I know? I try to be fair and open-minded, and I grew up with a lot of minorities. I don't think I'm particularly racist, but I'm not sure any of us can avoid it completely.
I don't know how to fix it, but I don't think we can claim to have done away with racism. It comes in subtle forms-- For example, you might see a bunch of white kids failing in school, and maybe your first impulse would be to blame the school or teachers for not providing the right environment. Paint the same picture with different colors, and suddenly your first impulse is to assume that the kids and parents are to blame. It doesn't need to be a conscious, thought out decision to be racist. Sometimes, it's just a matter of which conclusions we jump to.
It is also a perception issue where we somehow think Outcome=Opportunity... They think I am why they never succeed, but it's really because they never tried.
Even if we accept this, it only raises the question, why doesn't outcome work out to be, over the long run, analogous to opportunity? I'm not asking, "why doesn't every single kid succeed equally," but if you have a bunch of kids and we suppose all of them have the same opportunities, why don't we an average success rate among different groups? Or even if we accept your analysis, that they "never tried", then why aren't they trying?
I feel a twinge of something in your explanation, which is a sort of understanding of the world that I hear people express often. It assumes a just world, that people who don't succeed are either inherently inferior, or not trying. Further, it offers no explanation as to why people wouldn't try, other than something like, "They're just not the sort of people who work hard," again implying idea that lack of economic success is simply a function of being inherently inferior. The explanation treats it as though it's simply a function of laziness and stupidity, neither of which have explanations, neither of which can be helped.
But it doesn't jibe with any of my experience of how people work. People are "lazy" when they're asked to do things that they don't see as benefiting them, or they're put into circumstance where they don't anticipate success. Contrary to the narrative we hear in some pockets of the media, it's not tons of fun being poor and on welfare. I doubt the kids you grew up with were intentionally choosing that because the perceived a bright future for themselves, but thought welfare would be more fun.
So all of this just raises the question, what's really going on here? Why are these kids feeling demotivated and disinterested in improving their own lives? Whether or not there had been a lot of opportunity for those kids, I suspect they didn't believe that there was. I would suspect that they had received a lot of messages in their lives, from whatever, sources, saying that college was not for them, not something they could do, not something that they would be successful at, and not something that would provide them with a better future. And whether the sources of those messages were from white people or black people, the messages themselves are bound up in a whole culture of racism.
if we got rid of all the abusers and the sites that thrive on them, what is left is actually the 1% or so that is worht spending time and money on - the part that was the actual, original purpose of the internet.
Let's not talk about the "original purpose of the Internet" like it's some ideology that we need to stick to. It was come up with by different people with different goals, several decades ago, without any real understanding of what it would become.
There's a bigger problem though. What's being talked about is censoring anyone who someone-- it's not clear who will be the judge of this nice little utopia-- decides that their contributions are counter-productive or inappropriate. That sure sounds nice, since nobody likes inappropriate and counter-productive comments. Unfortunately, there isn't always complete agreement about which comments those are. However, once you start shutting people out of the conversation based on rules as vague as "they said something that I think is offensive, abusive, annoying, or counter-productive," it has a chilling effect on the rest of the conversation. Since it's unclear what will get you into trouble, any intelligent person will hold things back for fear of reprisal.
In fact, there's a great irony here, in that the complaint is that women don't feel comfortable voicing their opinions for fear of reprisal, and the proposed solution is to develop a way to bring reprisal to anyone who is determined-- by an unspecified judge-- to have said something offensive.
In reality, the Internet is already pretty good at dealing with these people. There are moderation systems on many websites which hide inflammatory comments. We all have the option to refuse to visit websites that lack moderation, but we also have the option to visit them. Say what you will about 4chan being a bunch of awful misogynistic trolls, but there's a lot of creativity that comes from that awfulness. I think you'll find that if you were to succeed in cleaning up all of the inappropriate and unfortunate stupidity that happens on the Internet, you'll lose a lot of those comments that you feel are part of the worthwhile 1%.
I don't actually know what the numbers are, but I suspect that not all black people are "urban". Also-- again, I'm not really an expert-- but I suspect part of the aversion to doing "white people stuff" (where that aversion exists) is the result of disbelief at the prospect of actually becoming accepted among white people. In other words, the reason some black people might discourage education (and be discouraged from trying to become educated) is that they don't really expect that they can enter into the world of "white America" and be successful and accepted.
It's like, Imagine someone told you, "All the billionaires in the world wear these funny clothes, speak in this particular dialect (a dialect which sounds really lame), and memorize obscure 18th-century poetry. If you make a jackass out of yourself trying to do these things, you'll be just like the billionaires, and then they'll make you a billionaire too!" You'd think that sounded like some silly nonsense, and you wouldn't bother trying to do it.
It seems like a difficult problem to me.
It is the author of this silly article who cannot tell the difference between (threats of) rape and offensive statements...
I feel like I'm missing something important going on right now, because it has seemed to me that this sort of confusion is becoming more and more prevalent, and I'm not sure what the cause is. I've seen lots of posts on sites like Facebook, and many posts in my Facebook feeds, that seem to conflate "things that women aren't happy about," with "systematic political oppression of women," and "physical violence and rape."
I got into a brief Facebook discussion with a friend who was complaining about the whole "not all men" thing. If you haven't heard about this, a little while back there was a bunch of complaints that when women discussed the problematic things that men did, some men would say "not all men do that," and the complaint was that these men were 'derailing the conversation." For example, you would see a discussion about how men won't tolerate women in a position of power, to which some unfortunate man would say, "Well some men will. I would." and he would get yelled at for derailing the conversation.
So this whole concept was brought up, and I thought, "Ok, I can understand why am man would want to interject that, but I can also understand some of the frustration being expressed, since these women know that 'not all men' do terrible things, because they're talking about trends, and not every individual case. Interjecting with an individual case seems to minimize the complaint, so that interjection is not welcome. I can understand that." But then the conversation went on.
One friend went on to say, "No, we're not just talking about trends. We're talking about what normally happens. Men won't hire women. Men won't pay women the same respect that they'll pay to another man. Men engage in violence towards women, and men rape women." At that point, I felt a bit ambushed. I'd just been warned that I wasn't allowed to point out that "not all men" do these terrible things, but shortly afterwards I was told that the "normal thing" was for men to rape women. It seemed pretty important to note that no, not all men rape women. It's not even the "normal thing" or really a trend. To my understanding, a large percentage of rapists are men, but that's not the same as saying a large percentage of men are rapists.
But these activists are unwilling to make that kind of distinction. In subsequent conversations that I've had, I've been told, for example, that men shouldn't "hit on women" because it was aggressive and made women uncomfortable, which supposedly makes it a form of rape. That's right, any behavior that made women feel uncomfortable was a form of rape. So I asked for clarification on what constituted "hitting on women", since obviously it can't be rape to approach a woman, pay attention to her, or attempt to talk to her. I was told that the distinction was whether the attention was "welcome". If a woman doesn't welcome the attention, then the activity is essentially the same as rape.
Now, I don't want to set up a straw man argument here. I'm not saying that women don't have valid concerns. They do. There are many unfortunate things that happen to women, and I'd welcome a discussion of how to resolve those things. However, reasonable distinctions need to be made. Not everything can be "rape" and "oppression". The fact that I might unintentionally benefit from being a man, e.g. getting paid more than a female coworker, does not make me an active oppressor of women, does not make me a perpetrator of violence, and it does not make me a rapist. Until I feel like I can get some agreement on that, at least from people that I know personally in IRL, I feel like these kinds of conversations are hopelessly muddled and we can't do anything to address any problems.
Yeah, I haven't been tracking the GamerGate thing, and I don't know what to think at this point. AFAIK, on the one hand, you have a bunch of people saying, "Journalists are corrupt, and they're very good at hiding this by claiming that their critics are just misogynists." On the other hand, you have a bunch of journalists claiming, "That's just some nonsense some 4chan guys came up with, and their accusations of corruption have no evidence. This is just a clever 4chan harassment campaign."
On the one hand, I totally believe that journalists are corrupt. On the other hand, I also believe that 4chan people are possible of some clever, fucked up, subversive things. Weighing it all out, just by watching the arguments and who seems more rational, I'm inclined to believe the GamerGate people. Their critics seem to be part of some weird neo-feminist campaign on the Internet right now to paint all women as victims, and all men as victimizers. People (myself included) are afraid to present opposing arguments, because any opposition is categorized as an endorsement of violence against women.
If this is a 4chan prank, then it's a bit surprising that the prank is so convincing and has gone on for so long. If it's not a prank, well then it's all a frightening little bit of censorship. Their complaint is that journalists cover their corruption by accusing any critics of being misogynists, and the response from journalists is to paint them as misogynists.