My home country of Germany has this bastard thing called "Abmahnung". Basically, if you violate the (civil) law, any lawyer can send you a cease-and-desist letter and you even have to pay him for his troubles. A certain subset of parasit... er, lawyers, discovered that the Internet is great for rapidly checking details of formal compliance for large numbers of online sites and generating a lot of such letters in a short time with minimal effort - but full bill.
For decades, the government has done little to curb that. Not nothing, but little.
an entity that contributed absolutely nothing to the internet
are you talking about strictly the EU government? Because then what you're saying is true for pretty much every country in the world.
Or are you talking about the people of Europe? In such case, omg are you wrong. Such a huge percentage of contributors to Free Software projects are from Europe. So much of the brains in all those "American" Internet companies were actually hired out of Europe. And a ton of Internet companies are in Europe. Just not the big Facebooks and Googles.
Because fascist europeans -
ahh.... the true colours appear...
That's why I'm not sad about their little shit church burning.
...which has nothing to do with anything except your irrational hatred.
Cancer on you and your shit children.
...your nurse needs to remind you about the medicine you should take.
I agree with you that it is certainly not a coincidence that so many people reached so many other people so easily using the exact social media platforms that would be affected by this.
I don't see the need of these filters which you are talking about. Is your site not caring about the copyright of the uploaded material now and do you want to defend that position?!
The upload filters are introduced indirectly. The word doesn't appear in the directive - but if your reaction time is one hour at any day and time of day, then unless you are an Internet giant with a 24/7 copyright infringement checking office, there is absolutely no way except upload filtering that you can guarantee you will be able to remove something within one hour when the claim reaches you Saturday night at 3 a.m.
China has an export-oriented economy and a restricted market, especially for Internet companies. That's why I don't consider them in this case, but yes, just to be entirely precise I should've mentioned it.
Here's the problem with the directive - and almost every legislation related to the Internet of the past 20 years - there are some well-meaning intentions behind it (and some nonsense, and a lot of hidden agenda). But it is all being done by people without a clue who are advised by lobbyists with agendas and companies to serve. Large companies. Small companies can't afford full-time lobbyists and lobster dinners.
Their intent is to reduce the power of Internet Giants such as Google and Facebook who - let's be honest - play fast and loose with concepts such as copyright, fair use and licensing. But their actions will do just the opposite. YouTube will cope, they have enough market, political, legal and technological power to build some tool that some lawyers and scientists will certify as compliant with the directive and that's that. Smaller companies, startups, the exact people that need support to compete with YouTube (or any other dominant player) can't afford that. And they now face another weapon that YouTube can use against them to drive them out of business. So their only option will be to... buy this certified solution from YouTube. And just like that you need to pay royalties to the person you wanted to compete with.
Politicians are idiots. Very few of them would last one month in a regular job. Germany (my home country) is one of the worst examples there. Loyalty to Merkel is the only factor that decides your career. Competence isn't. We have a minister of economy who has no clue about economy (and is a lawyer). A minister of defense who has no military experience whatsoever (neither practical nor theoretical - I'd be fine with a scholar with a degree in peace studies as minister of defense), we've not long ago had a minister of education that had to step down because research proved her degree was obtained fraudulently. The current one isn't better, she has no university degree and her education is in the hotel business. And the list goes on and on.
The whole digital world, meanwhile, belongs to the ministry of transportation (!!) - yes, I'm not making that up. Its minister has the equivalent of a master in philosophy, and no credible expertise in either transportation or digitial technology. He actually studied to become a teacher, but AFAIK never worked as such. He's a career politician and his master thesis was: "Election campaign of the CSU - a study on the example of the media tours of state premier and party leader Dr. Stoiber" -- basically, an ass-kissing paper because it's a study of his own party and party leader.
These people decided upon this directive. We have a saying in Germany that applies perfectly: "Ich kann gar nicht so viel essen wie ich kotzen mÃchte" - I can't eat as much as I want to vomit.
This stupid troll comes up every single time there is an article about the EU on/. - literally every time. I should have an answer on a shortcut. Don't you guys ever learn anything?
If Google, FB, Twitter or whatever you have were to leave the EU, or block the EU or whatever, the first thing that's going to happen is that their stocks take such a massive nosedive, you'll think it's the dot-com-crash all over again, just in fast-forward.
The EU is a larger market than the USA. With more people and more GDP. I'm tired of looking up the numbers every time this nonsense bullshit troll is posted, so do it yourself this time.
Excluding yourself from the largest single market in the world is shooting yourself in both feet, then both knees, and for good measure let's cut off the hand that did it.
It is not going to happen, never, ever no matter which loud noises someone might make, and everyone who keeps posting this old, stupid, zombified, keeps-coming-back idiocity on/. only reveals that he's using his brain as a sponge in the shower, but not for thinking.
If you knew that you are mediocre at best, but you had a lucky shot - you would cling to it like your life depended on it, because it actually does (not your physical life, but your financial and social life).
If you knew that you're good and you'll be just as successful with your next venture, you wouldn't hang on to the current one so much. Maybe it's boring already. Something new, maybe? Yeah, why not...
You seem to think that people exist for the benefit of companies.
I think you found the one thing that Zuckerberg and me agree on - that it's the other way around. Zuckerberg founded Facebook and certainly seems to be under the impression that it is his and exists for his benefit. I agree that companies exist for people, not the other way around.
Gates stepped aside smartly because his "road to the future" (sorry for the cheap pun) would've ruined MS in very short order. He missed every important technological development and rightly decided that the company couldn't take many more of such failures and for his own benefit and wealth leaving the company to someone who would be more successful in keeping it successful (and stock price high).
Obviously, Zuckerberg doesn't believe that FB is near the end of its run. I'm afraid he is right.
I don't know Assange personally, so who am I to judge on his character?
But I do wonder how much of this is something that years of confinement do to you? From what I gather, prison inmates have more than he had. At least they have a yard and sports and work. Assange was literally sitting in a few rooms for years. It would be strange if that hadn't affected him mentally.
True, but a bit like saying that money in the movie industry comes from renting DVDs.
There are other business models. And advertisement is slowly but surely moving the way it should, to the trashbin of history. I've been on the charge in this one, I admit, I've had adblockers running since the very first alpha versions appeared, and I despite ads in the real world as well. But every year I hear more people complaining about ads and more people that I help in installing adblockers.
Sites are already reacting to adblockers if they detect them, that is new and a good sign that the business model is nearing its end. Good riddance.
macOS is the only alternative that has a reasonable chance to beat windows out of the marketplace.
I've abandoned Linux on the desktop in favor of macOS for many happy years now. Gone are the days where I fight with the kernel to get some module installed or resolve dependencies. I'm still running all my servers on Linux and can't think of a better alternative. But on the desktop? I've seen several non-IT people up close (i.e. family and good friends) trying to jump from windows to either Linux or Mac. The Linux ones were largely failures and all but one went back after some time. The Mac ones were largely successful and created a much lower support burden for me.
Linux won't replace windows. It's been trying for two decades where it was always the next year that will be the year of Linux on the Desktop. We've been through a dozen window managers, some (like E) definitely more interesting, powerful and beautiful than windows, some bare-bones, some competing standards (who remembers the Gnome vs. KDE wars?), some attempts to copy windows, some attempts to copy NeXT (I still have a sweet spot for windowmaker in my heart), some completely new ideas.
None of them had any measurable success. None of the Wine and Parallels have impacted the windows stranglehold. Here's a chart from 2013 to 2019 - Linux barely appears: https://www.statista.com/stati...
Do you know what's eating Microsofts lunch? Android. As soon as you include smartphones and tablets, windows is a minority player in the market. But on the desktop, macOS has ten times the market share of Linux. Forget Linux on the Desktop, after 20 years it's time to get off the dead horse.
Or, you know, you could just make a shitty business model that everyone hates, wastes resources, time and nerves and is a haven for scammers illegal. Like most of the rest of the world. Every time I hear about this phenomenon, I shake my head in disbelief. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of unwanted commercial calls that I've received in my life. But then, I don't live in the land of the free-to-play, pay2win.
What we do need is a ban on exploitative capitalism. There, I've said it, cue the "omg communist" scare trolls.
But here's the thing: When making $$$ is the only purpose of anything, then there's nothing wrong with predatory game design, where you intentionally build in addiction using psychologists alongside coders. And it's not just Fortnite, it is almost every mobile game for the past years. More and more desktop games. And most of social media.
We could try to stem the flood with more regulations, forbidding certain titles, oversight committees, court cases, sending SWAT teams into game development studios and Facebook's headquarters and basically re-creating the War on Drugs because that worked so well and nobody has seen any drugs since the 90s and all the drug lords are impoverished today...
Or we could see the root cause and that's our unhealthy fixation on $$$ and our total neglect of everything else that makes a human and a society. If you are left-wing, you see in the environment and the influence of corporations on politics how this is wrong. If you are right-wing, you see in the falling apart of families, the disappearance of values from society and politics and the ever-expanding government control how that is wrong.
But we're too busy arguing over Clintons e-mails or Trumps hair-style to see that under it all we're really the same - except for the 0.1% of winners who're taking our humanity and turning it into profits. The makers of Fortnite are really the low-end of that bunch. And slowly we're all turning into such people because economic pressure makes sure that you, too, think more and more about money and less and less about other values.
You guys all didn't get what the zombie apocalypse really is about. Hint: The zombie virus is a metaphor.
I've used professional accounting software that allows a direct connection to the bank account to conduct transactions directly from you pressing the "pay this bill" button.
It used a specific API with an API key and 2FA.
I stand by my argument. Anyone who gives full access to their bank account to a 3rd party is a total idiot who deserves to have his account cleaned out.
Nobody should ever need my password to any account on any other site. Ever. Period, end of discussion. Everyone who asks for it is trying to pull a fast one or is so much beyond stupid that it amounts to the same thing.
Sadly, they aren't the first. There's a service over here in Europe where you can pay online at any website with a bank transaction even if you don't have a credit card (for you Americans: There are people older than 3 years that don't have a credit card in Europe, believe it or not). All they need is your bank number and PIN.
How anyone would give a 3rd party service the login details to their bank account is completely beyond me, but apparently people do because the service is still operational.
Far from what we should be teaching users, we teach them all the wrong things, and then complain that they're stupid. They're not. They just get stupid messages from people who should know better.
But sometimes you need the no-training-wheels approach from C. The last time I've used it was for a simulation which would have taken at least 4 times the memory using Java or C++. When you're using 80% of your available memory, 4x isn't possible.
There are a couple LOC counters that ignore comments and don't count lines with only opening or closing paranthesis etc. etc. - it's not like this is the first time the issue appears.
I know how AI works. But here's the problem: Ethics isn't taught by example only. A large part of ethics is putting yourself in the others place and ask how you'd think about the situation if you were them.
At this time, an AI can do nothing of that, not the smallest part.
A small part of ethics is in the form of rules that we can express and follow. Even ignoring that these rules constantly change and adapt, they are only a small part of the whole.
Most of ethics happens with at most very general, unspecific rules. Basically "don't be an asshole". Good luck expressing that in a programming language. Most of this requires you to be and feel like a human and to use empathy - by putting ourselves into another persons position in our imagination, we can deduce which behaviour we would find acceptable and which not if the roles were reversed. We are light years away from such a thing in AI.
tops the list because it's the oldest language with "the highest volume of written code"
It would've been easy to break numbers down by lines of code, wouldn't it?
Likewise by the year the code was written and whether or not it is currently being maintained (say, did the repository get an update within the past 3 months?).
No, it isn't. I've given speeches about this. Complexity is bullshit. On the contrary, a number of attacks (such as shoulder surfing) are made easier with complexity, because you type slower.
special characters made dictionary words safe to use providing the password is long enough.
No, it doesn't. Every cracking tool worth the name uses permutations to replace letters with special characters. If you've had the idea, don't you think people who do this stuff for a living haven't ?
Slashdot Mirror
My home country of Germany has this bastard thing called "Abmahnung". Basically, if you violate the (civil) law, any lawyer can send you a cease-and-desist letter and you even have to pay him for his troubles. A certain subset of parasit... er, lawyers, discovered that the Internet is great for rapidly checking details of formal compliance for large numbers of online sites and generating a lot of such letters in a short time with minimal effort - but full bill.
For decades, the government has done little to curb that. Not nothing, but little.
I'm sure we will see a new wave of this.
an entity that contributed absolutely nothing to the internet
are you talking about strictly the EU government? Because then what you're saying is true for pretty much every country in the world.
Or are you talking about the people of Europe? In such case, omg are you wrong. Such a huge percentage of contributors to Free Software projects are from Europe. So much of the brains in all those "American" Internet companies were actually hired out of Europe. And a ton of Internet companies are in Europe. Just not the big Facebooks and Googles.
Because fascist europeans -
ahh.... the true colours appear...
That's why I'm not sad about their little shit church burning.
...which has nothing to do with anything except your irrational hatred.
Cancer on you and your shit children.
...your nurse needs to remind you about the medicine you should take.
I agree with you that it is certainly not a coincidence that so many people reached so many other people so easily using the exact social media platforms that would be affected by this.
I don't see the need of these filters which you are talking about. Is your site not caring about the copyright of the uploaded material now and do you want to defend that position?!
The upload filters are introduced indirectly. The word doesn't appear in the directive - but if your reaction time is one hour at any day and time of day, then unless you are an Internet giant with a 24/7 copyright infringement checking office, there is absolutely no way except upload filtering that you can guarantee you will be able to remove something within one hour when the claim reaches you Saturday night at 3 a.m.
China has an export-oriented economy and a restricted market, especially for Internet companies. That's why I don't consider them in this case, but yes, just to be entirely precise I should've mentioned it.
Here's the problem with the directive - and almost every legislation related to the Internet of the past 20 years - there are some well-meaning intentions behind it (and some nonsense, and a lot of hidden agenda). But it is all being done by people without a clue who are advised by lobbyists with agendas and companies to serve. Large companies. Small companies can't afford full-time lobbyists and lobster dinners.
Their intent is to reduce the power of Internet Giants such as Google and Facebook who - let's be honest - play fast and loose with concepts such as copyright, fair use and licensing. But their actions will do just the opposite. YouTube will cope, they have enough market, political, legal and technological power to build some tool that some lawyers and scientists will certify as compliant with the directive and that's that. Smaller companies, startups, the exact people that need support to compete with YouTube (or any other dominant player) can't afford that. And they now face another weapon that YouTube can use against them to drive them out of business. So their only option will be to... buy this certified solution from YouTube. And just like that you need to pay royalties to the person you wanted to compete with.
Politicians are idiots. Very few of them would last one month in a regular job. Germany (my home country) is one of the worst examples there. Loyalty to Merkel is the only factor that decides your career. Competence isn't. We have a minister of economy who has no clue about economy (and is a lawyer). A minister of defense who has no military experience whatsoever (neither practical nor theoretical - I'd be fine with a scholar with a degree in peace studies as minister of defense), we've not long ago had a minister of education that had to step down because research proved her degree was obtained fraudulently. The current one isn't better, she has no university degree and her education is in the hotel business. And the list goes on and on.
The whole digital world, meanwhile, belongs to the ministry of transportation (!!) - yes, I'm not making that up. Its minister has the equivalent of a master in philosophy, and no credible expertise in either transportation or digitial technology. He actually studied to become a teacher, but AFAIK never worked as such. He's a career politician and his master thesis was: "Election campaign of the CSU - a study on the example of the media tours of state premier and party leader Dr. Stoiber" -- basically, an ass-kissing paper because it's a study of his own party and party leader.
These people decided upon this directive. We have a saying in Germany that applies perfectly: "Ich kann gar nicht so viel essen wie ich kotzen mÃchte" - I can't eat as much as I want to vomit.
*yawn*
This stupid troll comes up every single time there is an article about the EU on /. - literally every time. I should have an answer on a shortcut. Don't you guys ever learn anything?
If Google, FB, Twitter or whatever you have were to leave the EU, or block the EU or whatever, the first thing that's going to happen is that their stocks take such a massive nosedive, you'll think it's the dot-com-crash all over again, just in fast-forward.
The EU is a larger market than the USA. With more people and more GDP. I'm tired of looking up the numbers every time this nonsense bullshit troll is posted, so do it yourself this time.
Excluding yourself from the largest single market in the world is shooting yourself in both feet, then both knees, and for good measure let's cut off the hand that did it.
It is not going to happen, never, ever no matter which loud noises someone might make, and everyone who keeps posting this old, stupid, zombified, keeps-coming-back idiocity on /. only reveals that he's using his brain as a sponge in the shower, but not for thinking.
If he doesn't suck, he should resist...
It's the opposite, actually.
If you knew that you are mediocre at best, but you had a lucky shot - you would cling to it like your life depended on it, because it actually does (not your physical life, but your financial and social life).
If you knew that you're good and you'll be just as successful with your next venture, you wouldn't hang on to the current one so much. Maybe it's boring already. Something new, maybe? Yeah, why not...
You seem to think that people exist for the benefit of companies.
I think you found the one thing that Zuckerberg and me agree on - that it's the other way around. Zuckerberg founded Facebook and certainly seems to be under the impression that it is his and exists for his benefit. I agree that companies exist for people, not the other way around.
Gates stepped aside smartly because his "road to the future" (sorry for the cheap pun) would've ruined MS in very short order. He missed every important technological development and rightly decided that the company couldn't take many more of such failures and for his own benefit and wealth leaving the company to someone who would be more successful in keeping it successful (and stock price high).
Obviously, Zuckerberg doesn't believe that FB is near the end of its run. I'm afraid he is right.
I don't know Assange personally, so who am I to judge on his character?
But I do wonder how much of this is something that years of confinement do to you? From what I gather, prison inmates have more than he had. At least they have a yard and sports and work. Assange was literally sitting in a few rooms for years. It would be strange if that hadn't affected him mentally.
you could just... you know... invest in another company if you don't like that one.
Holding 3 billion of stock with basically no decision rights. That's a cute position to be in. How greedy do you have to be?
Money from the internet comes from advertising
True, but a bit like saying that money in the movie industry comes from renting DVDs.
There are other business models. And advertisement is slowly but surely moving the way it should, to the trashbin of history. I've been on the charge in this one, I admit, I've had adblockers running since the very first alpha versions appeared, and I despite ads in the real world as well. But every year I hear more people complaining about ads and more people that I help in installing adblockers.
Sites are already reacting to adblockers if they detect them, that is new and a good sign that the business model is nearing its end. Good riddance.
macOS is the only alternative that has a reasonable chance to beat windows out of the marketplace.
I've abandoned Linux on the desktop in favor of macOS for many happy years now. Gone are the days where I fight with the kernel to get some module installed or resolve dependencies. I'm still running all my servers on Linux and can't think of a better alternative. But on the desktop? I've seen several non-IT people up close (i.e. family and good friends) trying to jump from windows to either Linux or Mac. The Linux ones were largely failures and all but one went back after some time. The Mac ones were largely successful and created a much lower support burden for me.
Linux won't replace windows. It's been trying for two decades where it was always the next year that will be the year of Linux on the Desktop. We've been through a dozen window managers, some (like E) definitely more interesting, powerful and beautiful than windows, some bare-bones, some competing standards (who remembers the Gnome vs. KDE wars?), some attempts to copy windows, some attempts to copy NeXT (I still have a sweet spot for windowmaker in my heart), some completely new ideas.
None of them had any measurable success. None of the Wine and Parallels have impacted the windows stranglehold. Here's a chart from 2013 to 2019 - Linux barely appears: https://www.statista.com/stati...
Do you know what's eating Microsofts lunch? Android. As soon as you include smartphones and tablets, windows is a minority player in the market. But on the desktop, macOS has ten times the market share of Linux. Forget Linux on the Desktop, after 20 years it's time to get off the dead horse.
Or, you know, you could just make a shitty business model that everyone hates, wastes resources, time and nerves and is a haven for scammers illegal. Like most of the rest of the world. Every time I hear about this phenomenon, I shake my head in disbelief. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of unwanted commercial calls that I've received in my life. But then, I don't live in the land of the free-to-play, pay2win.
Barking up the wrong tree much?
What we do need is a ban on exploitative capitalism. There, I've said it, cue the "omg communist" scare trolls.
But here's the thing: When making $$$ is the only purpose of anything, then there's nothing wrong with predatory game design, where you intentionally build in addiction using psychologists alongside coders. And it's not just Fortnite, it is almost every mobile game for the past years. More and more desktop games. And most of social media.
We could try to stem the flood with more regulations, forbidding certain titles, oversight committees, court cases, sending SWAT teams into game development studios and Facebook's headquarters and basically re-creating the War on Drugs because that worked so well and nobody has seen any drugs since the 90s and all the drug lords are impoverished today...
Or we could see the root cause and that's our unhealthy fixation on $$$ and our total neglect of everything else that makes a human and a society. If you are left-wing, you see in the environment and the influence of corporations on politics how this is wrong. If you are right-wing, you see in the falling apart of families, the disappearance of values from society and politics and the ever-expanding government control how that is wrong.
But we're too busy arguing over Clintons e-mails or Trumps hair-style to see that under it all we're really the same - except for the 0.1% of winners who're taking our humanity and turning it into profits. The makers of Fortnite are really the low-end of that bunch. And slowly we're all turning into such people because economic pressure makes sure that you, too, think more and more about money and less and less about other values.
You guys all didn't get what the zombie apocalypse really is about. Hint: The zombie virus is a metaphor.
I've used professional accounting software that allows a direct connection to the bank account to conduct transactions directly from you pressing the "pay this bill" button.
It used a specific API with an API key and 2FA.
I stand by my argument. Anyone who gives full access to their bank account to a 3rd party is a total idiot who deserves to have his account cleaned out.
"beyond sketchy" is putting it very mildly.
This is the behaviour of scammers, period.
Nobody should ever need my password to any account on any other site. Ever. Period, end of discussion. Everyone who asks for it is trying to pull a fast one or is so much beyond stupid that it amounts to the same thing.
Sadly, they aren't the first. There's a service over here in Europe where you can pay online at any website with a bank transaction even if you don't have a credit card (for you Americans: There are people older than 3 years that don't have a credit card in Europe, believe it or not). All they need is your bank number and PIN.
How anyone would give a 3rd party service the login details to their bank account is completely beyond me, but apparently people do because the service is still operational.
Far from what we should be teaching users, we teach them all the wrong things, and then complain that they're stupid. They're not. They just get stupid messages from people who should know better.
No. With a good compiler, C has minimal memory overhead and doing a complex simulation in assembler isn't high on my wish list.
You are absolutely right that some languages are more verbose by their very nature.
Still, we have better ways than just counting lines.
Yes, much easier to fuck up in C.
But sometimes you need the no-training-wheels approach from C. The last time I've used it was for a simulation which would have taken at least 4 times the memory using Java or C++. When you're using 80% of your available memory, 4x isn't possible.
There are a couple LOC counters that ignore comments and don't count lines with only opening or closing paranthesis etc. etc. - it's not like this is the first time the issue appears.
I know how AI works. But here's the problem: Ethics isn't taught by example only. A large part of ethics is putting yourself in the others place and ask how you'd think about the situation if you were them.
At this time, an AI can do nothing of that, not the smallest part.
A small part of ethics is in the form of rules that we can express and follow. Even ignoring that these rules constantly change and adapt, they are only a small part of the whole.
Most of ethics happens with at most very general, unspecific rules. Basically "don't be an asshole". Good luck expressing that in a programming language. Most of this requires you to be and feel like a human and to use empathy - by putting ourselves into another persons position in our imagination, we can deduce which behaviour we would find acceptable and which not if the roles were reversed. We are light years away from such a thing in AI.
tops the list because it's the oldest language with "the highest volume of written code"
It would've been easy to break numbers down by lines of code, wouldn't it?
Likewise by the year the code was written and whether or not it is currently being maintained (say, did the repository get an update within the past 3 months?).
I dimly remember that turning it off will also require your passcode the first time after it turns on again. But I could be wrong.
While I think length + complexity is the answer,
No, it isn't. I've given speeches about this. Complexity is bullshit. On the contrary, a number of attacks (such as shoulder surfing) are made easier with complexity, because you type slower.
special characters made dictionary words safe to use providing the password is long enough.
No, it doesn't. Every cracking tool worth the name uses permutations to replace letters with special characters. If you've had the idea, don't you think people who do this stuff for a living haven't ?