And what you are saying is 100% identical to the dilemma of storing your money at home vs. in a bank vault.
Yes, the bank has higher security and is harder to break into, but the rewards are much higher.
Big surprise: Both burglars and bank robbers still exist. Neither has gone out of existence and neither will their equivalents in the digital space. Really, the first thing most geeks need to get into their heads is that digital is not as different as they'd like (the same way most non-geeks need to get into their heads that digital is more different than they're comfortable with).
If I want your corporate e-mail, I will attack you one way or the other. What do I care where you store it if by hacking your desktop computer I can access it? Doesn't make much of a difference if your mail client loads it from a remote server in the basement or a remote server on the moon.
But the vast majority of attacks (the yearly Verizon report is a good source of numbers if you feel like sprinkling your opinion with a few facts) are not targeted. Most systems aren't compromised because someone wanted you, but because someone scanned your subnet for some vulnerability your systems happened to have. Then he broke in and started checking out the place to see if there's anything of value.
I'm not sure if you are intentionally dense or having an entirely different conversation. The one I was having was about how to appear like a normal, lucky gambler when in fact you are cheating.
In many ways we get all up an arms about Governments and Corporations "spying" or "profiling your information" however the internet wasn't ever really meant for private information.
Those two statements do not clash.
Postcards are not meant for private information, either. But a government agency systematically intercepting and reading them would still run afoul of the wiretapping laws.
Remember this fact if you are going to choose a SaaS or Cloud solution. Not that using such systems are Bad or Evil like RMS likes to claim, however if you are going to trust your information to an outside source, you better be sure that you could handle a breach.
That depends entirely on your threat model and your own capabilities. For many small companies who can't afford to have any in-house security know-how, an outside service provider could actually reduce the probability of a breach.
The problem with SaaS and Cloud solutions isn't that they are inherently less secure or anything like that. The real problem is the all-your-eggs-in-one-basket issue. If a major cloud provider ever has a serious breach, everyone has been breached, not just one unlucky target.
When I got on the Internet (don't remember the exact year, probably 1993), FTP was the major application and our Internet introduction at the university discouraged us from using WWW as it was a considered a pointless waste of precious resources (what are graphics good for if you are looking for information?).
I remember having a bandwith quota of 1 MB national and 100 kB international IP traffic. Yes, international data traffic was expensive and so they metered it differently.
A spokesman for ExxonMobil said the company disagrees with the findings.
When is the last time you heard a corporation agree with any kind of information that threatens its profits? Did it ever happen? Is there a recorded case in the history of mankind of a corporation agreeing with some kind of new information without having to be pressured into doing so?
but that's a terrible method of hiding an aimbot..
I know and I know how to write better ones, and yours is one of the simple and yet almost undetectable approaches.
My point was that even in the very, very early days of aimbots, before such refinement, one of the very first thing the cheaters learnt was that you can't hit with every shot or it's immediately obvious that you are cheating.
Oh and on that 'Make it a huge thing.' I will then be very suspicious if I would win anything. I would want to get out as quietly as possible. I would not celebrate. I would not rent a limo. I would check out and leave. But then I am not a gambler.
If you cheat then you want to look like you didn't cheat.
Anyone winning big through actual luck would make it a big thing, celebrate, rent a limo, whatever. If you don't act that way, you'll set off alarm bells.
This. Every cheater knows that to stay undetected, you can't win too often. Even aimbots quickly included code to intentionally miss a shot every now and then.
There are only two ways to get away with stealing money at a casino. One is to remain within the margin if probability - appear to be lucky, but not impossibly lucky. Either win some, lose some, with a total just slightly in your favour, or lose mostly, but then get the jackpot and stop playing after that. Make it a huge thing. Celebrate, rent a limo, marry a stranger, whatever. Don't pocket it and vanish, that'll be crazy suspicious.
Oh, the second way. That is, of course, to own the casino.
Throughout history, successful men have often made sure there's someone near to them who could tell them the truth. In the medieval court, where the king could chop off your head for saying the wrong thing, it was the court jester. Today, for many executives, it's their wife. Some exceptional men have a paid-for position whose job is to point out all the flaws to them. Heck, even the Vatican has the advocatus diaboli (and yes, that is where the term originated).
Because it's on these new cool social networks that only geeks know about and... uh, what? It's not 2005 anymore? Really?
Ok, I have no idea. Slow news day? Some editor found it funny? Misclick? Cat video scared the editors in hitting "accept" on three random submissions? Wrong moon phase?
E-mail has no reasonable expectation of privacy or secrecy.
Technically, correct.
Legally, wrong.
E-Mail is still communication between a sender and a recipient. Opening a letter if you are the post office is as easy as reading an e-mail that passes through your mail server. And still it is illegal.
Your examples are in relation to the recipient of the message. You're right, he can store it, copy it, print it out and pin it to the wall in the office kitchen. But the recipient isn't the point at all, the intermediate party (Google, in this case) is.
It will also, likely, be parsed by the recipients mail filter setting, and also by their anti-virus, anti-phising, and other anti-whatever systems. What makes Gmail's system different?
Intent and purpose. The law does consider this, even though some of the/. geeks have to look them up in a dictionary.
If we block recipient mail systems from "automated-reading" of messages, we effectively make it illegal to filter ALL junk, spam, and phising protections.
No, we don't. What is wrong with us geeks that we always think we're the only smart people on the planet? Lawyers have been around for 2000 years more than computer programmers. How about assuming that they've figured out a thing or two in that time?
The postal system, for example, where these rules come from, does contain exceptions, for exactly those cases where they are necessary and desirable. For example, the post office is allowed to open your letter if neither recipient nor sender address on the outside are readable so it can check if there's useable information inside that they can use to deliver or return it.
The law isn't binary and stupid. Why are we when we talk about it?
No, they aren't. You are thinking in simplistic, binary terms. The law rarely does that. Intention and purpose are important considerations in legal issues.
Are we going to be throwing meatspace postal workers into jail when they read the text next to the address on a postcard?
legal fail.
The law, contrary to most geeks, understands the difference between random events and systematic, intentional, for-profit activities. And frankly, if you don't understand the difference between a postal worker who looks at a postcard every now and then, and some automated system that scans every postcard going through the entire postal system, then I'm not sure I can explain it to you, because I'd probably have to start by explaining the meaning of "the".
The second important point is that the privacy of communications does not and should not depend on sender and receiver having to encrypt or otherwise secure their communication. The privacy of your communication is a right. If you can secure it by technical means, you wouldn't need the right. The right exists precisely because of the imbalance between an individual and his means to secure his communications, and huge entities like corporations and the government and their capabilities to break this security.
I also reject that the gmail privacy statement applies to an e-mail that I as a non-gmail user send to you. We may possibly discuss about the case that you're using an @gmail.com address - but you don't necessarily do. Many people forward their mails to their gmail accounts from a non-gmail address.
The main problem we have in coding today is not that too few people can code. It's that way, way too few people can code well, because it's all this hobbyist oh-look-I-once-wrote-a-simple-script-in-VB-now-let-me-rewrite-your-enterprise-systems bullshit.
I would rather have 10 professional coders than 100 amateur coders.
So why do we want to teach kids how to program? How many of them will need it and how many of them will gain some other benefit from it? There's a couple things that school does even though few people then go into a job in that field - music, for example. But that is part of culture and many people believe that a basic understanding of music greatly improves your life and enjoyment of things.
So, instead of asking details like "at what age", you should first answer basics like what for and why.
I don't think we should put programming into school for everyone. I think it should be available optionally for those who want to look into it and find out if it's something they enjoy, but not more.
600 complaints to the BBB. For a company that refuses to register with the BBB.
596 complaints with a user base of 50 million works out to 0.001192% of people are unsatisfied customers.
That is the worst example of statistics abuse I've seen in a long while. Almost nobody outside the US even knows about the BBB, for starters.
What matters is not how many customers have a problem. What matters is how you handle it. These are not 600 unsatisfied customers, these are 600 customers unsatisfied to such a degree that they launched an official complaint with a quasi-government agency. That's a long shot from just being unhappy. How often have you been unhappy with some company or product in your life? How often have you filed a formal BBB complaint? Divide your percentage by that fraction, then by the fraction of US vs. world-wide customers, then you are getting somewhere into the vicinity of a number that means what you claim it does.
Not to mention that you eat x spiders every year on average, in your sleep. I forgot what x was, but it was not a fractional number, it's actually a few.
However, an IBM keyboard designer didn't want to give Microsoft a single button to start things up
So putting the windows key on keyboards everywhere was just a kindergarden-level revenge act? Did they send IBM a postcard with the words "so there!" ?
Nope, never had to. They don't make a product that will take all of the games I bought hostage when it breaks.
That doesn't mean I would touch it if they brought out an entertainment system. So I kind of don't know what your point is. If it is that there are at least two companies that suck, we have no argument on that.
Also, the comments are insightful. True, the whole thing did have one other effect that is barely noticed: It killed the last big smartphone OS that was not developed by a US company.
It does, however, have a point. If this wasn't a hostile takeover from the start then it sure looks a lot like one. In other words: If MS had planned to acquire Nokia on the cheap long ago, something like what happened would've been a good plan to come up with.
And it should really teach people to not get into bed with MS. But then again, so should've the last dozen or so victims they left behind.
One of the (very few) selling points for the new iPhone 5C and 5S is that they now come with Apple's spreadsheet program for free
It is?
This is the first I've heard of it, so either you and I are reading entirely different news, or it's a minor point somewhere down the list where few people notice it.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for this insightful outside perspective; our beer goggles must be deceiving us.
Apparently, because you keep election these fuckers.
Problem is these two interact.
And what you are saying is 100% identical to the dilemma of storing your money at home vs. in a bank vault.
Yes, the bank has higher security and is harder to break into, but the rewards are much higher.
Big surprise: Both burglars and bank robbers still exist. Neither has gone out of existence and neither will their equivalents in the digital space. Really, the first thing most geeks need to get into their heads is that digital is not as different as they'd like (the same way most non-geeks need to get into their heads that digital is more different than they're comfortable with).
If I want your corporate e-mail, I will attack you one way or the other. What do I care where you store it if by hacking your desktop computer I can access it? Doesn't make much of a difference if your mail client loads it from a remote server in the basement or a remote server on the moon.
But the vast majority of attacks (the yearly Verizon report is a good source of numbers if you feel like sprinkling your opinion with a few facts) are not targeted. Most systems aren't compromised because someone wanted you, but because someone scanned your subnet for some vulnerability your systems happened to have. Then he broke in and started checking out the place to see if there's anything of value.
I'm not sure if you are intentionally dense or having an entirely different conversation. The one I was having was about how to appear like a normal, lucky gambler when in fact you are cheating.
In many ways we get all up an arms about Governments and Corporations "spying" or "profiling your information" however the internet wasn't ever really meant for private information.
Those two statements do not clash.
Postcards are not meant for private information, either. But a government agency systematically intercepting and reading them would still run afoul of the wiretapping laws.
Remember this fact if you are going to choose a SaaS or Cloud solution. Not that using such systems are Bad or Evil like RMS likes to claim, however if you are going to trust your information to an outside source, you better be sure that you could handle a breach.
That depends entirely on your threat model and your own capabilities. For many small companies who can't afford to have any in-house security know-how, an outside service provider could actually reduce the probability of a breach.
The problem with SaaS and Cloud solutions isn't that they are inherently less secure or anything like that. The real problem is the all-your-eggs-in-one-basket issue. If a major cloud provider ever has a serious breach, everyone has been breached, not just one unlucky target.
Oh yes, memories.
When I got on the Internet (don't remember the exact year, probably 1993), FTP was the major application and our Internet introduction at the university discouraged us from using WWW as it was a considered a pointless waste of precious resources (what are graphics good for if you are looking for information?).
I remember having a bandwith quota of 1 MB national and 100 kB international IP traffic. Yes, international data traffic was expensive and so they metered it differently.
A spokesman for ExxonMobil said the company disagrees with the findings.
When is the last time you heard a corporation agree with any kind of information that threatens its profits? Did it ever happen? Is there a recorded case in the history of mankind of a corporation agreeing with some kind of new information without having to be pressured into doing so?
but that's a terrible method of hiding an aimbot..
I know and I know how to write better ones, and yours is one of the simple and yet almost undetectable approaches.
My point was that even in the very, very early days of aimbots, before such refinement, one of the very first thing the cheaters learnt was that you can't hit with every shot or it's immediately obvious that you are cheating.
Oh and on that 'Make it a huge thing.' I will then be very suspicious if I would win anything. I would want to get out as quietly as possible. I would not celebrate. I would not rent a limo. I would check out and leave. But then I am not a gambler.
If you cheat then you want to look like you didn't cheat.
Anyone winning big through actual luck would make it a big thing, celebrate, rent a limo, whatever. If you don't act that way, you'll set off alarm bells.
This. Every cheater knows that to stay undetected, you can't win too often. Even aimbots quickly included code to intentionally miss a shot every now and then.
There are only two ways to get away with stealing money at a casino. One is to remain within the margin if probability - appear to be lucky, but not impossibly lucky. Either win some, lose some, with a total just slightly in your favour, or lose mostly, but then get the jackpot and stop playing after that. Make it a huge thing. Celebrate, rent a limo, marry a stranger, whatever. Don't pocket it and vanish, that'll be crazy suspicious.
Oh, the second way. That is, of course, to own the casino.
This is wisdom.
Throughout history, successful men have often made sure there's someone near to them who could tell them the truth. In the medieval court, where the king could chop off your head for saying the wrong thing, it was the court jester. Today, for many executives, it's their wife. Some exceptional men have a paid-for position whose job is to point out all the flaws to them. Heck, even the Vatican has the advocatus diaboli (and yes, that is where the term originated).
but also why the fuck is this on slashdot...
Because it's on these new cool social networks that only geeks know about and ... uh, what? It's not 2005 anymore? Really?
Ok, I have no idea. Slow news day? Some editor found it funny? Misclick? Cat video scared the editors in hitting "accept" on three random submissions? Wrong moon phase?
E-mail has no reasonable expectation of privacy or secrecy.
Technically, correct.
Legally, wrong.
E-Mail is still communication between a sender and a recipient. Opening a letter if you are the post office is as easy as reading an e-mail that passes through your mail server. And still it is illegal.
Your examples are in relation to the recipient of the message. You're right, he can store it, copy it, print it out and pin it to the wall in the office kitchen. But the recipient isn't the point at all, the intermediate party (Google, in this case) is.
It will also, likely, be parsed by the recipients mail filter setting, and also by their anti-virus, anti-phising, and other anti-whatever systems. What makes Gmail's system different?
Intent and purpose. The law does consider this, even though some of the /. geeks have to look them up in a dictionary.
If we block recipient mail systems from "automated-reading" of messages, we effectively make it illegal to filter ALL junk, spam, and phising protections.
No, we don't. What is wrong with us geeks that we always think we're the only smart people on the planet? Lawyers have been around for 2000 years more than computer programmers. How about assuming that they've figured out a thing or two in that time?
The postal system, for example, where these rules come from, does contain exceptions, for exactly those cases where they are necessary and desirable. For example, the post office is allowed to open your letter if neither recipient nor sender address on the outside are readable so it can check if there's useable information inside that they can use to deliver or return it.
The law isn't binary and stupid. Why are we when we talk about it?
No, they aren't. You are thinking in simplistic, binary terms. The law rarely does that. Intention and purpose are important considerations in legal issues.
The law and the courts are smarter than most /. geeks. They understand the concepts of "intent" and "purpose".
Are we going to be throwing meatspace postal workers into jail when they read the text next to the address on a postcard?
legal fail.
The law, contrary to most geeks, understands the difference between random events and systematic, intentional, for-profit activities. And frankly, if you don't understand the difference between a postal worker who looks at a postcard every now and then, and some automated system that scans every postcard going through the entire postal system, then I'm not sure I can explain it to you, because I'd probably have to start by explaining the meaning of "the".
The second important point is that the privacy of communications does not and should not depend on sender and receiver having to encrypt or otherwise secure their communication. The privacy of your communication is a right. If you can secure it by technical means, you wouldn't need the right. The right exists precisely because of the imbalance between an individual and his means to secure his communications, and huge entities like corporations and the government and their capabilities to break this security.
I also reject that the gmail privacy statement applies to an e-mail that I as a non-gmail user send to you. We may possibly discuss about the case that you're using an @gmail.com address - but you don't necessarily do. Many people forward their mails to their gmail accounts from a non-gmail address.
We don't teach kids to do surgery, either.
The main problem we have in coding today is not that too few people can code. It's that way, way too few people can code well, because it's all this hobbyist oh-look-I-once-wrote-a-simple-script-in-VB-now-let-me-rewrite-your-enterprise-systems bullshit.
I would rather have 10 professional coders than 100 amateur coders.
So why do we want to teach kids how to program? How many of them will need it and how many of them will gain some other benefit from it? There's a couple things that school does even though few people then go into a job in that field - music, for example. But that is part of culture and many people believe that a basic understanding of music greatly improves your life and enjoyment of things.
So, instead of asking details like "at what age", you should first answer basics like what for and why.
I don't think we should put programming into school for everyone. I think it should be available optionally for those who want to look into it and find out if it's something they enjoy, but not more.
600 complaints to the BBB. For a company that refuses to register with the BBB.
596 complaints with a user base of 50 million works out to 0.001192% of people are unsatisfied customers.
That is the worst example of statistics abuse I've seen in a long while. Almost nobody outside the US even knows about the BBB, for starters.
What matters is not how many customers have a problem. What matters is how you handle it. These are not 600 unsatisfied customers, these are 600 customers unsatisfied to such a degree that they launched an official complaint with a quasi-government agency. That's a long shot from just being unhappy. How often have you been unhappy with some company or product in your life? How often have you filed a formal BBB complaint? Divide your percentage by that fraction, then by the fraction of US vs. world-wide customers, then you are getting somewhere into the vicinity of a number that means what you claim it does.
Not to mention that you eat x spiders every year on average, in your sleep. I forgot what x was, but it was not a fractional number, it's actually a few.
Some things in life are simple:
Almost everyone agrees that HFT is evil.
Nothing is being done about it.
How can both of these things be true at the same time without revealing a serious, dangerous flaw in our political and economic system?
However, an IBM keyboard designer didn't want to give Microsoft a single button to start things up
So putting the windows key on keyboards everywhere was just a kindergarden-level revenge act? Did they send IBM a postcard with the words "so there!" ?
Nope, never had to. They don't make a product that will take all of the games I bought hostage when it breaks.
That doesn't mean I would touch it if they brought out an entertainment system. So I kind of don't know what your point is. If it is that there are at least two companies that suck, we have no argument on that.
That was an interesting read, thanks.
Also, the comments are insightful. True, the whole thing did have one other effect that is barely noticed: It killed the last big smartphone OS that was not developed by a US company.
TFA is crap, horrible blog-level amateur writing.
It does, however, have a point. If this wasn't a hostile takeover from the start then it sure looks a lot like one. In other words: If MS had planned to acquire Nokia on the cheap long ago, something like what happened would've been a good plan to come up with.
And it should really teach people to not get into bed with MS. But then again, so should've the last dozen or so victims they left behind.
It also comes with a free "if it breaks, you're fucked and we'll laugh about you" add-on, courtesy of the Valve customer service.
Wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole. Not with Valve behind it.
One of the (very few) selling points for the new iPhone 5C and 5S is that they now come with Apple's spreadsheet program for free
It is?
This is the first I've heard of it, so either you and I are reading entirely different news, or it's a minor point somewhere down the list where few people notice it.