I think their problem is that they should have sold it under the guise of a computer security assessment tool or something, and not outright say it's for spying on people. It's like those countless micro-camera that are sold to "monitor babies", when in reality everybody knows they're bought by peeping toms who plant them in ladies bathrooms
We are talking about a highly, highly innovative light sculpture, one that will stand between 60 and 100 meters tall so that people can physically enter it
I think there's prior art. on the idea of tall hollow lit-up things that people can visit the inside of...
There's private data on Facebook? I thought the whole point of sites like this was to enable teenagers and not-quite-grown-ups to plaster all nitty gritty details of their lives on the internet in unreadable blue-on-pink pages.
Firefox isn't really "free software"
He's not the only one. But as always, normal people don't really care if free software is 100% kosher as long as it works well for them.
and his dreams of a day where nobody is involved in developing or promoting proprietary software.
People who have trade secrets to hide will develop proprietary software, that's a fact of life. Video card manufacturers for instance may not want to reveal the underlying structure of their hardware through the driver code. I fail to see how this is morally wrong.
It's a royal pain in the ass to end users who may be forced into a particular OS because of feeble driver support, but the motives of the driver maker is understandable.
I'll stick to books - they have one really big advantage - they are not electronic and give my eyes a rest from a bloody screen
Not sure about that: eye problems, especially myopia, are strongly linked to reading. So while books are better than computer screens, they may not rest your eyes as much as you think.
Since I already use the computer for other things, my "Eeebook" costs me zilch and I don't have to lug around yet another device that I have to charge with yet another charger, etc...
or hell ANY GOD DAMN FUCKING BUG YOU FIND, needs fixing, right Microsoft?
Any goddamn bug doesn't need fixing asap the same way. Software always has bugs, even really good software, so it's a matter of prioritizing which bugs are show-stoppers, which are less problematic and which are minor.
The problem with Microsoft is their habit of releasing bananaware: they ship green software that matures at the customers, at the expense of the customer of course who essentially pays to become a beta-tester for Microsoft. In other terms, when other reputable software shops iron out most bugs in-house before releasing their products, Microsoft just removes show-stoppers and let its customers report all the other bugs.
That's great, guys, but don't you think being proud that you were right about your code being exploited is... backwards?
Well, they're not proud of making exploitable code (if they were, there would have been a giant endless party at Microsoft for the last 20 years), they're proud of predicting when/how fast their code will be exploited.
That's like being proud you correctly predicted you would get stabbed while walking through a ghetto wearing gang colors.
No, it's like correctly predicting that you'll get stabbed 17 minutes after entering the ghetto, by 6 gang members dressed in red.
If countries wanted to ensure that people come and spend money, then why to they (US included) make getting a visa so difficult?
China doesn't need foreigners to come spend money on its soil, its making a fortune exporting good abroad anyway.
As for the US, it's another ballgame: the country's attitude toward visas oscillates between the "keeping these filthy underpaid workers from taking american jobs out" attitude in peace time, to full-blown paranoid "the terrorists are coming!" when national security is threatened.
Funny you should say that, my first thought when I read "Finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years" was that it's got to be a bitch to withdraw cash from an ATM if you're a Yakusa...
Why does nobody ask Google anything today?
on
Googling Security
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Forget the what-if-we-knew-x-years-ago supposition : why does nobody - no regulatory body that is - demand that Google explain exactly what data they collect and what the heck they do with it?
Really, it seems that, since they started out saying "do no evil", everybody took their word for it and let it go at that. Google is worth billions, reaches millions worldwide, provides dozens of services people have come to rely on, and yet no-one knows what they do exactly, aside from banalities such as "their business model is selling ads". Heck, even Microsoft is under 100x more intense scrutiny than Google...
I like and use Google services as much as the next guy, but their ultra-secretive habits make me very wary of them.
I know a person born with no arms who says she isn't handicapped or disabled, since she never had arms in the first place so didn't "lose" physical abilities, does everything (and I mean everything) with her feet, and knows no other way of doing things.
Some new paradigm indeed. What you describe is how computing was done before (servers and terminals) before PCs got powerful enough for software to become decentralized, which until recently, was viewed as a major advance in computing.
Nowadays, people seem to think it's such a great idea to go back to the past, but I suspect it's a concerted effort by software companies to go back to the days where they could control everything and charge everybody anything they please through centralized server.
I think it a little strange that you or anyone else believe locking your own data in some remove server in some proprietary format is fine, and having to work on your files through a slow internet link and browser, and paying for use on a per-hour basis is a good idea.
But what I'll never understand is that anybody would deem Google worthy of trust as far as data privacy is concerned.
This web-app business is another web-two-oh fad that will never work because nobody want the concept of it. Software company would love it though, and if it ever gets forced upon users, it'll be a sad day in computing.
I don't consider nuclear energy to be a good/viable alternative to fossil fuels
Nuclear energy *is* fossil fuel (uranium reserves are dwindling fast also). Nuclear fusion on the other hand produces very little harmful byproducts, if any, and while technically also consuming fossil fuels (deuterium and tritium), the supply is almost inexhaustible given the amount of energy even minute amounts of the stuff give off.
I understand your bitterness over countries fighting to take control of an ever-shrinking reserve of energy that has no future and damages the environment, but consider this also :
Successful nuclear fusion reactors (that put out more energy that they consume), at the current rate of scientific research, will appear in the 2040's at the earliest. In the meantime, fossil fuel prices are going to go up and up, and millions with low incomes are going to find it hard to heat their homes, buy food and travel to work. Do you really want them to struggle to survive until the magic energy bullet is found?
This said, I agree that now would be the time to form international consortiums to manage whatever is left of oil reserves worldwide intelligently (fat chance, too much money involved of course) and diverts the money spent in pointless wars over said oil to research, so the aforementioned magic bullet might be found earlier.
Exactly, this is typical telco bully-boy behaviour.
Likewise, if GM indicated they had no intention of manufacturing manure-powered vehicles, I don't see how they could sue someone who decided to take the manure-powered vehicle market into their own hands as a result.
Your remark leads to the general question: what business does a document viewer have trying to execute embedded Javascript scripts? a PDF file is essentially a PostScript file, so its content is supposed to be interpreted as a page description and nothing more.
This is reminiscent of Microsoft's "executable".DOC files that was used to spread viruses around years ago. This is what you get when you try to make a tool too clever for its own good.
For instance, Bosworth said a cardinal rule of his is KISS, or, in his words, "Keep It Simple and Stupid." Gestures like tooling, icons, right-click and drag-drop are too obscure, he said
I guess nobody listens to him at Microsoft then...
Slashdot Mirror
it's a human thing, somebody must have really cared for them
Big holes in the head, broken limbs, bits of stone axe in the back? someone must have really cared for them, but in a Charlie Manson sort of way...
I think their problem is that they should have sold it under the guise of a computer security assessment tool or something, and not outright say it's for spying on people. It's like those countless micro-camera that are sold to "monitor babies", when in reality everybody knows they're bought by peeping toms who plant them in ladies bathrooms
Hmm, touché...
We are talking about a highly, highly innovative light sculpture, one that will stand between 60 and 100 meters tall so that people can physically enter it
I think there's prior art. on the idea of tall hollow lit-up things that people can visit the inside of...
Facebook may not share private data to the CIA
There's private data on Facebook? I thought the whole point of sites like this was to enable teenagers and not-quite-grown-ups to plaster all nitty gritty details of their lives on the internet in unreadable blue-on-pink pages.
Firefox isn't really "free software"
He's not the only one. But as always, normal people don't really care if free software is 100% kosher as long as it works well for them.
and his dreams of a day where nobody is involved in developing or promoting proprietary software.
People who have trade secrets to hide will develop proprietary software, that's a fact of life. Video card manufacturers for instance may not want to reveal the underlying structure of their hardware through the driver code. I fail to see how this is morally wrong.
It's a royal pain in the ass to end users who may be forced into a particular OS because of feeble driver support, but the motives of the driver maker is understandable.
I'll stick to books - they have one really big advantage - they are not electronic and give my eyes a rest from a bloody screen
Not sure about that: eye problems, especially myopia, are strongly linked to reading. So while books are better than computer screens, they may not rest your eyes as much as you think.
the thing I carry around all the time with me, despite my cellphone, is my EeePC. So, while not as nice as the Kindle, my solution is
EeePC + FBReader/PDF reader + eeerotate = instant ebook reader
Since I already use the computer for other things, my "Eeebook" costs me zilch and I don't have to lug around yet another device that I have to charge with yet another charger, etc...
or hell ANY GOD DAMN FUCKING BUG YOU FIND, needs fixing, right Microsoft?
Any goddamn bug doesn't need fixing asap the same way. Software always has bugs, even really good software, so it's a matter of prioritizing which bugs are show-stoppers, which are less problematic and which are minor.
The problem with Microsoft is their habit of releasing bananaware: they ship green software that matures at the customers, at the expense of the customer of course who essentially pays to become a beta-tester for Microsoft. In other terms, when other reputable software shops iron out most bugs in-house before releasing their products, Microsoft just removes show-stoppers and let its customers report all the other bugs.
That's great, guys, but don't you think being proud that you were right about your code being exploited is... backwards?
Well, they're not proud of making exploitable code (if they were, there would have been a giant endless party at Microsoft for the last 20 years), they're proud of predicting when/how fast their code will be exploited.
That's like being proud you correctly predicted you would get stabbed while walking through a ghetto wearing gang colors.
No, it's like correctly predicting that you'll get stabbed 17 minutes after entering the ghetto, by 6 gang members dressed in red.
If countries wanted to ensure that people come and spend money, then why to they (US included) make getting a visa so difficult?
China doesn't need foreigners to come spend money on its soil, its making a fortune exporting good abroad anyway.
As for the US, it's another ballgame: the country's attitude toward visas oscillates between the "keeping these filthy underpaid workers from taking american jobs out" attitude in peace time, to full-blown paranoid "the terrorists are coming!" when national security is threatened.
Varices can't be used as root passwords, sorry.
Funny you should say that, my first thought when I read "Finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years" was that it's got to be a bitch to withdraw cash from an ATM if you're a Yakusa...
Forget the what-if-we-knew-x-years-ago supposition : why does nobody - no regulatory body that is - demand that Google explain exactly what data they collect and what the heck they do with it?
Really, it seems that, since they started out saying "do no evil", everybody took their word for it and let it go at that. Google is worth billions, reaches millions worldwide, provides dozens of services people have come to rely on, and yet no-one knows what they do exactly, aside from banalities such as "their business model is selling ads". Heck, even Microsoft is under 100x more intense scrutiny than Google...
I like and use Google services as much as the next guy, but their ultra-secretive habits make me very wary of them.
from TFA:
KitsuneYume made things work, working with an engineer to devise an adaptive controller to help him get his game on.
I know a person born with no arms who says she isn't handicapped or disabled, since she never had arms in the first place so didn't "lose" physical abilities, does everything (and I mean everything) with her feet, and knows no other way of doing things.
Some new paradigm indeed. What you describe is how computing was done before (servers and terminals) before PCs got powerful enough for software to become decentralized, which until recently, was viewed as a major advance in computing.
Nowadays, people seem to think it's such a great idea to go back to the past, but I suspect it's a concerted effort by software companies to go back to the days where they could control everything and charge everybody anything they please through centralized server.
I think it a little strange that you or anyone else believe locking your own data in some remove server in some proprietary format is fine, and having to work on your files through a slow internet link and browser, and paying for use on a per-hour basis is a good idea.
But what I'll never understand is that anybody would deem Google worthy of trust as far as data privacy is concerned.
This web-app business is another web-two-oh fad that will never work because nobody want the concept of it. Software company would love it though, and if it ever gets forced upon users, it'll be a sad day in computing.
Isn't that what you can do in GTA and other such games already? Or did you mean non-americans killing americans?
Sorry, I usually use the term "fossil fuel" as its larger meaning of "non-renewable energy source". My bad.
I don't consider nuclear energy to be a good/viable alternative to fossil fuels
Nuclear energy *is* fossil fuel (uranium reserves are dwindling fast also). Nuclear fusion on the other hand produces very little harmful byproducts, if any, and while technically also consuming fossil fuels (deuterium and tritium), the supply is almost inexhaustible given the amount of energy even minute amounts of the stuff give off.
Unfortunately, your comment pretty much accurately reflects the state of involvement people have in the political discourse nowadays.
Also, people don't seem to realize there are hardly any real democracies in the world, only republics.
I understand your bitterness over countries fighting to take control of an ever-shrinking reserve of energy that has no future and damages the environment, but consider this also :
Successful nuclear fusion reactors (that put out more energy that they consume), at the current rate of scientific research, will appear in the 2040's at the earliest. In the meantime, fossil fuel prices are going to go up and up, and millions with low incomes are going to find it hard to heat their homes, buy food and travel to work. Do you really want them to struggle to survive until the magic energy bullet is found?
This said, I agree that now would be the time to form international consortiums to manage whatever is left of oil reserves worldwide intelligently (fat chance, too much money involved of course) and diverts the money spent in pointless wars over said oil to research, so the aforementioned magic bullet might be found earlier.
Exactly, this is typical telco bully-boy behaviour.
Likewise, if GM indicated they had no intention of manufacturing manure-powered vehicles, I don't see how they could sue someone who decided to take the manure-powered vehicle market into their own hands as a result.
The judge was right to throw the case out.
Your remark leads to the general question: what business does a document viewer have trying to execute embedded Javascript scripts? a PDF file is essentially a PostScript file, so its content is supposed to be interpreted as a page description and nothing more.
This is reminiscent of Microsoft's "executable" .DOC files that was used to spread viruses around years ago. This is what you get when you try to make a tool too clever for its own good.
For instance, Bosworth said a cardinal rule of his is KISS, or, in his words, "Keep It Simple and Stupid." Gestures like tooling, icons, right-click and drag-drop are too obscure, he said
I guess nobody listens to him at Microsoft then...