So, as I understand it, a programmer was sentenced to 97 years in prison for stealing the algorithm that Goldman Sachs used to steal money from other people.
The single most critical element of any market, including a stock market, is that it is, “fair.” That means, the same price and the same terms for everybody. In fact, these are the same words used by the NY stock exchange and NASDAQ.
But how is using super computers for millisecond arbitrage “equal terms for everybody?”
How do you think that hundreds of top employees at Goldman can take home over $1 million a year in compensation? With overtime?
Oh, my God, could they possibly pick a more inept, sloppy and non-technological organization in the western world than the USPS. Not only are they the largest polluter on record (little mail trucks get 4 mpg) but they are the number one contributor to tree-cutting and filling land-fills.
The most sophisticate piece of equipment in the main post office near me is the time-clock.
Maybe the term “junk mail,” which the USPS calls, “standard mail,” because that is their performance standard, will be expanded to include “junk data,” which no no doubt will be renamed “standard data,” in their honor.
I hereby accept all parties for a bet that (1) any process they use for data collection will badly executed and (2) they will be so badly hacked that “post office root kits” will appear in grammar school science fairs.
Microsoft repeatedly changed agreements with developers. At one point, they required developers to pay thousands of dollars for a two-year membership, and then less than a year later simply discontinued that program and replaced it with a similar program that required new payment.
Microsoft sold Microsoft Money, claiming that it could import Quicken data. In fact, the box was empty but they promised a download in less than 60 days, which was repeatedly delayed. By then, it was too late to legally return the empty box to the retailer. And, finally, it did not import Quicken data. The entire product was a fraud.
Microsoft sold versions of Office, at the same time, which were different. We needed to standardize, and complained to Microsoft. We were told that “the version in each box was the version we purchased,” and that “version control was not part of the product.” In fact, Microsoft has admitted that they have no idea what versions they produce or ship and are not able to replicate builds.
Microsoft has an effective monopoly on Word. As a result they have terminated development work to fix bugs, and Word has many of the same bugs it had 15 years ago (such as tables not formatting across page boundaries).
Microsoft simply overpowered the Justice Department in their monopoly probe, paying about 100 times as much in legal expenses as the Justice Department could afford.
Europe has not been as scared to reign in Microsoft’s illegal competitive practices as the US. As a result, Microsoft is the most fined company in the world. Yet, the delay every time and consistently pay more fines for refusing to comply with ruling.
Microsoft charged PC vendors for a copy of their OS for every machine they built, even if the machine shipped did not include the OS. This requirement was built into their contract, and PC vendors could not negotiate.
Microsoft made retailers eat the entire cost of product returns, unlike every other software company. Retailers could not survive if they didn’t carry Microsoft software, but most retailers’ broke even or lost money because of the onerous return policy.
Microsoft required Intel to write all of the BIOS and low-level CPU code and give it to Microsoft for free. Microsoft then sold it. One year Intel objected and Microsoft refused to support Intel’s latest processor, causing sales to go close to zero. Intel had to immediately capitulate to the blackmail.
Microsoft consistently and purposefully damages the Macintosh user interface in their products so the GUI experience is not superior on a Mac compared to a PC.
IMHO, Microsoft should be awarded the LEAST ethical company of the last century.
Or, get a Mac. No such little annoyances. I don't hate Windows. It's kind of like hating a Yugo. Not worth the mental energy. I use it when I need to. Like rental car.
I was a teacher for a while, while my daughter was in an all-women college. The fact is that women find group participation harder than men. We saw it in the classroom all the time. Teachers had to gently restrain over-eager boys while calmly encouraging the girls to speak up. But surveys at the end of the term ALWAYS showed that both the boys and girls said they "got more out of" classes that had mixed gender participation. Why would the wikipedia environment be any different?
I did a small amount of testing and it appears to me that this technique permits more leaks of user's behavior than stated directly in the article.
Lots of websites leave you "logged in" for a while, including/. This means that the user does not have to have an open page or tab, and may not perceive that he or she is actually "logged in." For example, amazon.com.
These sites produce a different page and results for certain actions depending on that status. It looks like Cardwell's method could detect this difference. Suppose you knew what shopping sites a user preferred? First, that provides likely demographic and gender information. Second, if in fact you were able to steal login credentials you would know immediately where you could use them. Third, you could use that information for social engineering in phising fraud. Fourth, you could promote your particular item for sale, on say, ebay or amazon.
I love how these stories put "porn" and "child porn" in the same breath. There is a subtle (sarcasm) difference. Porn is legal. Child porn is illegal. Porn is 99.9% of the market. Child porn is 0.1% (if that) of the market.
This is pretty much like say "drive by" and "drive by shooting" are similar because they both involve cars and a driver and a road.
The original story, in Scientific American, agrees with you, but also sites research that tracks "equivalent students" entering college (based on SAT scores, etc) and comes to a similar but slightly different conclusion.
A year ago I ordered something from ebay and it was counterfeit. The seller refused to take it back and ebay refused to refund for something like 90 days. I was so pissed I sent a letter to the FBI with names and addresses. I received a nice phone call from the SF FBI office telling me that they did not have enough staff to go after anything less than $10,000 and typically more like $100,000, He also told me they have a handful of agents working inside ebay.
I told the ebay people they were clearly a bunch of criminals themselves and they decided to refund me immediately.
I love amazon.
Can anyone suggest a better system for outing the tiny fraction of bad guys? The current system is clearly not very effective. Chopping off the head because the fingers are slippery is not how a society should work.
The author complains about "fragmentation of routing tables," but then goes on to talk about route hijacking. Doesn't IPv6 largely fix routing table fragmentation? (Real question -- hoping for answer.) Route hijacking is largely fixed by good routing filter hygiene, as explained in previous posts. Most routing protocols support encryption, which won't help if a trusted router sends you bad routes, but can at least make sure you can tell the difference between trusted and untrusted route updates. I don't think BGP supports encrypted advertisements. Anybody know?
Your TCO having the users on Macs will be lower, as explained in prior post. Less help desk issues, almost no viruses, better backup, higher user satisfaction, and 3-year h/w service from Apple. Have your employees sign up for swimming or cooking at the local CC for one quarter and get 10% educational discount on the hardware. Run VMware Fusion on select machines that HAVE to have Windows.
20 employees? Put what you can in the cloud.
Economics is tricky. I worked closely with one of the two largest software companies in the world on the issue of piracy.
Most non-paying users of software would NOT purchase the product if a free version is unavailable.
Non-paying customers are getting free training and free market share development. Consider, if you will, comparison to the porn model. You give away 95% for free so that when and if someone decides (business: "needs") to upgrade to supported product they will chose yours over a competitors.
If you take away money from a business (charge for a previously free service) you are adding ZERO to the overall economy, because the business has to cut back somewhere else.
If ENOUGH people start paying, who weren't then the developer has more money to improve the product, which improves the productivity of ALL the users (paying or not) and that DOES add to the overall productivity and this improves the economy.
Conclusion: YES, you want people to pay for software they use but (IMHO) measuring the economic impact is a devil's game. At best.
I guess I was unclear. By "bug spay" I meant products like OFF that people apply to their skin to keep mosquitoes from biting. It doesn't kill them, it just tastes bad. The result would be we would be overrun by pesky mosquitoes that we could not repel. As in, "Oops!"
Let the TV's go dark. Put a sign on each one that says, "Although Comcast is legally obligated to provide cable TV service to , they are no longer providing that service. apologizes for the inconvenience. Please contacts 888-(comcast) for more information."
You might be able to shame them into giving you the boxes for free...
There are tens of thousands of quality part time IT jobs in school districts. Companies, too, but those are harder to locate and less predictable. Many schools, both public and private, cannot afford a full-time person, but desperately need professional IT services. Also for smaller Cities, working directly for city gov't. (Look for a City where the city offices are in the same building as the police department.) These organizations don't know what to look for or how to interview. They will appreciate your experience. Walk in with a complete IT support plan for them, not just a resume.
Slashdot Mirror
Is Samsung now a NORTH Korean company?
So, as I understand it, a programmer was sentenced to 97 years in prison for stealing the algorithm that Goldman Sachs used to steal money from other people.
The single most critical element of any market, including a stock market, is that it is, “fair.” That means, the same price and the same terms for everybody. In fact, these are the same words used by the NY stock exchange and NASDAQ.
But how is using super computers for millisecond arbitrage “equal terms for everybody?”
How do you think that hundreds of top employees at Goldman can take home over $1 million a year in compensation? With overtime?
Oh, my God, could they possibly pick a more inept, sloppy and non-technological organization in the western world than the USPS. Not only are they the largest polluter on record (little mail trucks get 4 mpg) but they are the number one contributor to tree-cutting and filling land-fills.
The most sophisticate piece of equipment in the main post office near me is the time-clock.
Maybe the term “junk mail,” which the USPS calls, “standard mail,” because that is their performance standard, will be expanded to include “junk data,” which no no doubt will be renamed “standard data,” in their honor.
I hereby accept all parties for a bet that (1) any process they use for data collection will badly executed and (2) they will be so badly hacked that “post office root kits” will appear in grammar school science fairs.
Microsoft repeatedly changed agreements with developers. At one point, they required developers to pay thousands of dollars for a two-year membership, and then less than a year later simply discontinued that program and replaced it with a similar program that required new payment.
Microsoft sold Microsoft Money, claiming that it could import Quicken data. In fact, the box was empty but they promised a download in less than 60 days, which was repeatedly delayed. By then, it was too late to legally return the empty box to the retailer. And, finally, it did not import Quicken data. The entire product was a fraud.
Microsoft sold versions of Office, at the same time, which were different. We needed to standardize, and complained to Microsoft. We were told that “the version in each box was the version we purchased,” and that “version control was not part of the product.” In fact, Microsoft has admitted that they have no idea what versions they produce or ship and are not able to replicate builds.
Microsoft has an effective monopoly on Word. As a result they have terminated development work to fix bugs, and Word has many of the same bugs it had 15 years ago (such as tables not formatting across page boundaries).
Microsoft simply overpowered the Justice Department in their monopoly probe, paying about 100 times as much in legal expenses as the Justice Department could afford.
Europe has not been as scared to reign in Microsoft’s illegal competitive practices as the US. As a result, Microsoft is the most fined company in the world. Yet, the delay every time and consistently pay more fines for refusing to comply with ruling.
Microsoft charged PC vendors for a copy of their OS for every machine they built, even if the machine shipped did not include the OS. This requirement was built into their contract, and PC vendors could not negotiate.
Microsoft made retailers eat the entire cost of product returns, unlike every other software company. Retailers could not survive if they didn’t carry Microsoft software, but most retailers’ broke even or lost money because of the onerous return policy.
Microsoft required Intel to write all of the BIOS and low-level CPU code and give it to Microsoft for free. Microsoft then sold it. One year Intel objected and Microsoft refused to support Intel’s latest processor, causing sales to go close to zero. Intel had to immediately capitulate to the blackmail.
Microsoft consistently and purposefully damages the Macintosh user interface in their products so the GUI experience is not superior on a Mac compared to a PC.
IMHO, Microsoft should be awarded the LEAST ethical company of the last century.
Yup, dumb metaphor for eject. But it doesn't do that "full" thing that drives OCD people nuts.
Or, get a Mac. No such little annoyances. I don't hate Windows. It's kind of like hating a Yugo. Not worth the mental energy. I use it when I need to. Like rental car.
I was a teacher for a while, while my daughter was in an all-women college. The fact is that women find group participation harder than men. We saw it in the classroom all the time. Teachers had to gently restrain over-eager boys while calmly encouraging the girls to speak up. But surveys at the end of the term ALWAYS showed that both the boys and girls said they "got more out of" classes that had mixed gender participation. Why would the wikipedia environment be any different?
I did a small amount of testing and it appears to me that this technique permits more leaks of user's behavior than stated directly in the article.
Lots of websites leave you "logged in" for a while, including /. This means that the user does not have to have an open page or tab, and may not perceive that he or she is actually "logged in." For example, amazon.com.
These sites produce a different page and results for certain actions depending on that status. It looks like Cardwell's method could detect this difference. Suppose you knew what shopping sites a user preferred? First, that provides likely demographic and gender information. Second, if in fact you were able to steal login credentials you would know immediately where you could use them. Third, you could use that information for social engineering in phising fraud. Fourth, you could promote your particular item for sale, on say, ebay or amazon.
Click that logout button, cowboy!
How would that be different than ATT service 2day?
How come Microsoft gets to name an entire galaxy? I think this is another one of their b**s claims for "market share."
Sarcasm Warning.
How much does it cost to (re-)name Mars?
I love how these stories put "porn" and "child porn" in the same breath. There is a subtle (sarcasm) difference. Porn is legal. Child porn is illegal. Porn is 99.9% of the market. Child porn is 0.1% (if that) of the market.
This is pretty much like say "drive by" and "drive by shooting" are similar because they both involve cars and a driver and a road.
The original story, in Scientific American, agrees with you, but also sites research that tracks "equivalent students" entering college (based on SAT scores, etc) and comes to a similar but slightly different conclusion.
A year ago I ordered something from ebay and it was counterfeit. The seller refused to take it back and ebay refused to refund for something like 90 days. I was so pissed I sent a letter to the FBI with names and addresses. I received a nice phone call from the SF FBI office telling me that they did not have enough staff to go after anything less than $10,000 and typically more like $100,000, He also told me they have a handful of agents working inside ebay.
I told the ebay people they were clearly a bunch of criminals themselves and they decided to refund me immediately.
I love amazon.
Can anyone suggest a better system for outing the tiny fraction of bad guys? The current system is clearly not very effective. Chopping off the head because the fingers are slippery is not how a society should work.
I personally think there should be a constitutional amendment protecting privacy. But there is not. Beside, buying your privacy is surprisingly cheap.
Also, IPv6 assigns addresses in geographic blocks, so you can easily tell of routes don't make any sense at all, like US to US routing via China.
The author complains about "fragmentation of routing tables," but then goes on to talk about route hijacking. Doesn't IPv6 largely fix routing table fragmentation? (Real question -- hoping for answer.) Route hijacking is largely fixed by good routing filter hygiene, as explained in previous posts. Most routing protocols support encryption, which won't help if a trusted router sends you bad routes, but can at least make sure you can tell the difference between trusted and untrusted route updates. I don't think BGP supports encrypted advertisements. Anybody know?
Damn, I love capitalism!
You have every right to track my activities and I have every right to purchase back my own privacy.
Is everybody happy? I am.
yes, duh.
Your TCO having the users on Macs will be lower, as explained in prior post. Less help desk issues, almost no viruses, better backup, higher user satisfaction, and 3-year h/w service from Apple. Have your employees sign up for swimming or cooking at the local CC for one quarter and get 10% educational discount on the hardware. Run VMware Fusion on select machines that HAVE to have Windows. 20 employees? Put what you can in the cloud.
Conclusion: YES, you want people to pay for software they use but (IMHO) measuring the economic impact is a devil's game. At best.
I guess I was unclear. By "bug spay" I meant products like OFF that people apply to their skin to keep mosquitoes from biting. It doesn't kill them, it just tastes bad. The result would be we would be overrun by pesky mosquitoes that we could not repel. As in, "Oops!"
Are they immune to bug spray, too?
Let the TV's go dark. Put a sign on each one that says, "Although Comcast is legally obligated to provide cable TV service to , they are no longer providing that service. apologizes for the inconvenience. Please contacts 888-(comcast) for more information."
You might be able to shame them into giving you the boxes for free ...
There are tens of thousands of quality part time IT jobs in school districts. Companies, too, but those are harder to locate and less predictable. Many schools, both public and private, cannot afford a full-time person, but desperately need professional IT services. Also for smaller Cities, working directly for city gov't. (Look for a City where the city offices are in the same building as the police department.) These organizations don't know what to look for or how to interview. They will appreciate your experience. Walk in with a complete IT support plan for them, not just a resume.