I'm not so quick in discounting them, even though the effect of Steve's passing has been quite obvious.
But Apple never was a one-man show, even though he took the spotlight. From all I know, Steve's strength was not in designing or creating anything, but in inspiring others and, most importantly, his ability to cut through the crap to the core issues and to kill anything that sucked. Where other companies spend time and resources on bad products (and sometimes even bring them to market), Steve would just kill it brutally with a few words and everyone could go back to making something good.
It doesn't have to be "incredibly smart". It just has to be smart in the right places.
The original iPhone didn't really do anything that wasn't available elsewhere already. But it bundled the proper things together in the proper way and had the proper design to make it all work well. I had owned several PDAs before, but the iPhone was the PDA I had always wanted.
Same for the watch. My bet is that while everyone else is working on cramming as much crap into the watch as possible. Apple is busy making sure there is no crap on it, only the right mix of the right stuff you really want on your wrist.
In fact, that precisely is an Internet - a network of networks. All the Internet was meant to be is a connection between networks.
in fact i believe they want us to wall ourselves up. Much easier to be controlled by the state.
Never subscribe to a stupid, idiotic, brain-dead conspiracy theory when all you need is basic human psychology.
Frankly, the government is the very last people I would consider competent to run a conspiracy. They're the most incompetent, corrupt, stupid lot I've ever seen.
We really want it to be as open and trusting and chaotic as possible.
Not trusting. Chaotic and trusting don't mix. All it takes to spoil everything is one asshole who abuses you. See spam.
Despite the risks of opening yourself to abuse, it can always be corrected, when abuse is detected.
Which is why spam was a short-lived temporary issue, yes?
And that's a fundamental flaw and a stupid mistake, as we learn again and again and again. Whether it's spam, the dominance and abuse of certain large players, the commercial takeover, or now the surveilance state.
Never built a relationship with parties you don't know personally on trust.
Never.
Ever.
Humans are inherently cooperative with peers, and competitive with everyone else. Your trust will be abused.
Bruce is right, but he misses the scope of the problem. If we want to take back the Internet, not just from the NSA, but also from Google, Facebook, the spammers, the scammers, the media industry and the corporate interest, we need to completely re-engineer it on a different fundamental concept.
One of self-interest. One based on the assumption that the other side to a data exchange is hostile. One assuming that intermediates can not be trusted.
90% of this Internets problems would be wiped out if we were to re-design it with an assumption of hostility.
That's hard to swallow for us geeks. Most of us have grown up in a hostile world we barely understand. With people bullying you at school, then exploiting you in the workplace, meanwhile egomanic idiots who are good at fooling people and nothing else take all the credit. So we have a deep desire for a more friendly world. Building that ourselves was a dream. It was incredibly cool while it lasted. Now it's time to wake up.
You can use encryption. That's pretty common for botnet malware, their owners have the same issue, they want your computer, but they don't want to open it to the competition. In fact, some of them will even patch the vulnerability that allowed them access, so others can't take over the machine.
Glad to hear that. There's been NSA paranoid around SELinux ever since it was released. I'm pretty sure no other part of Linux has been so thoroughly searched for backdoors.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Many years ago, I was one of the top SELinux guys in Europe, so allow me some remarks:
SELinux has nothing to do with cryptography.
It's an RBAC/MAC system to secure your local computer at the kernel level. That also means most ring-0 exploits will go right past it. So backdooring SELinux is basically the same as backdooring any other Linux.
Are we 100% certain that it contains no backdoors? Nope, of course not. You never can be. Are we 100% certain that gcc doesn't contain backdoors?
If you're afraid the NSA is after you, disabling SELinux is probably the least effective action you can take. There's at least 20 other things you should be more worried about.
For open source systems, the person or persons who inserted the weak code should be identified and kicked off the project. It may just be incompetence, but that's a good reason to keep them out of security-critical areas.
You'll end up with nobody left.
Cryptography is hard. I don't think anyone in the field has a perfect track record. Kicking people out for mistakes is the most stupid thing you can do. What you need is more quality control. Crucial parts of the code need to get the OpenBSD treatment - full code review by multiple people.
What am I missing here? On what grounds does the payment handler demand business details? Heck, if my bank asked for my business plan (I own a small company), I'd tell them to sod off.
Trouble is, far too many large companies are so arrogant, they stick to their "Fuck You!" line until their business goes to the wall.
Yes.
I fail to see the problem. A company like that should go out of business. If it happened more often, the surviving companies would be more customer-friendly, because the other ones are all done.
Frankly, we have too many small companies failing and way, way too few large ones.
That doesn't mean that some companies aren't so egregiously bad at customer service that you wouldn't walk away from doing business with them.
Exactly. The one thing you can always do is vote with your money.
When the german Bahn AG (train company) was stupid to me about a 40ÂâÂdispute, I told them that in my business position I control a couple thousand Euros in travel budget going their way - or not. They blew me off, I told my secretary to always check alternatives and book them if they're the same or slightly more expensive from now on.
When O2 was stupid to me about my (rather small) mobile contract, I told them they could be nice to me or I'd cancel my much larger phone and DSL contracts as well. They didn't listen, so I move all my business elsewhere. When I got the usualy retention call, I told them why.
It is unlikely that your move will get as much attention and most likely it'll all get lost at the customer service level. I used #o2sucks on plenty of my FB postings while the above crap was going down, but I don't think it got very much attention.
But someone has to start. And if you move your business away from the crap companies, they won't even notice. But if a thousand people like you do it, they'll start to notice. And if ten or a hundred thousand do it, they just might smarten up. And if they don't, they might go belly up and good riddance. But someone has to start, so be that someone.
If airlines would get 99% of the luggage right, that would mean several pieces of luggage lost every flight.
I'm pretty sure their percentage numbers are quite good, but since passenger numbers are high, especially in the US where you need to fly virtually everywhere, the total numbers add up. Plus a lost piece of luggage is usually more of a problem than a lost Fedex package.
No system is perfect, and for systems like these, there is a business-optimal point where the cost of increasing the reliability further is higher than the cost of losing or misplacing some luggage.
That's the real reason behind regulations like the 200 âÂthey have to pay airline customers in the EU for delays of over 2 hours. It's not about giving the customer money, it's about giving the airlines an incentive to be on time.
And it works. I had two flights this year that were massively delayed, but arrived at just under the 2 hour mark. One was 1:53 delayed, not kidding. (Condor, btw., worst airline I've ever flown, won't fly it again)
Kimble ratted his partners out to the FBI when he was under investigation for a previous crime some years ago. Once a traitor, always a traitor. If you think there are no closed-doors talks between Kimble who's trying to save his neck and the government, you must be very naive indeed. And the obvious thing that Kimble can offer is - the users of Mega, of course.
he hasn't shown "the right attitude" and that is the main and real reason why he is being persecuted now.
If you aren't a paid shill, you should change that. Your misleading and faulty argument surely qualifies, and you'd have to be an idiot to think that a multi-millionaire scam artist in the public spotlight would not have hired a PR agency to improve his online image.
Kimble is a career criminal, simple as that. He was prosecuted and even convicted before, and by several other governments. That distinct sound you're hearing is the shattered pieces of your argument falling apart.
If you are a large-scale career criminal, there are two paths you can go.
One, you can fly under the radar, like the people in the famous train robberies and serial bank breaks that many of us have heard about but almost nobody can name even one of the actual people involved.
Two, you can scale it up so much that it becomes quasi-legal by sheer scale and being-part-of-the-system, like the financial industry, the corporate corruption or the various pet-sectors of the various countries that are untouchable (Spain had a huge real estate scandal - nobody was ever convicted. Germany even has a name for the network of corporations, banks and government entities so closely connected that they all protect each other: Deutschland AG. In Greece, the shipping industry was holy for decades. In the US it is probably the military industry, and so on).
Kimble was arrogant and self-obsessed enough to think he could reach the same place simply by having an overblown ego and being audacious.
What is preventing these persons from also taking money from criminal organizations or other governments for the products of their expertise?
How about working for the secret service of a government that has demonstrated that it isn't above killing people without trial if it thinks they're a danger?
I wouldn't want to be on the shitlist of the NSA, not for a year or so worth of salary. Snowden had a motivation that goes way beyond money. You'd need something like that.
Morons there is no such thing as an exclusive back door. Once you broken the security of other countries networks, you leave access for anyone waiting to exploit, bet anything you like those morons did not at all to monitor and ensure those back doors were not exploited by others.
That's not true.
We know of malware that not only uses keyed and encrypted command channels, but also patches the hole it came through. You see, lots of criminals have also decided that once your computers is theirs, it should stay theirs and not fall to the next competitor coming along.
It's not that hard to do. Remember that this is a mainstream media article, so the technical details are dumbed down.
Malware that stores a re-install copy of itself in a hidden location isn't news. That they speak of "implants" to survive equipment upgrades leads me to believe they mean the whole thing, not an individual installation. This could be as easy as the malware instances monitoring each other and re-infecting remotely if one instance goes away. Again, at least conceptually that is 10+ years old. It's a nice feat if they pulled it off in practice, but it's not magic.
Scientists do not directly produce money, which is why their contributions are so easily overlooked.
The finance industry, on the other hand, very directly produces money, it practically prints it ever since the various regulations were all abandoned. That's why their importance is so dramatically overstated. (seriously, "too big to fail"? You kidding me? Anyone who believed that for a minute is too dumb for this planet).
It's all part of a culture problem that values appearance more than substance (marketing vs. production) and immediate profit more than long-term profitability (quarterly focus).
Good requirement. When I'm paying a premium rate billed per minute, I really want to have to spend 20-30 seconds listening to a recorded message telling me how much I'm paying...
Might differ per country, but in my country, that message must be free by law, so you are only starting to pay after it has played.
Unfortunately for both him and us, the information that helps citizen decide if their government is working in their interest or corrupt, or working at all and the information that outside forces need to evaluate possible holes in the governments security efforts can overlap quite a bit.
So yes, many leaks that are in the interest of the public will also serve the evil terrorist-pedophile-foreigner-evildoers (interesting idea: Take a publication from the height of the Cold War and replace "communist" with "terrorist" - my guess is you could publish a good part of them with that change today and nobody would notice they were written 30 years ago).
Anyways - there are two lessons here that politicians have not and never will understand, because few people who work outside the security industry do, even if you repeat it to them a hundred times:
One, security through obscurity isn't security. There are some secrets that really are secrets - almost always, they are very specific details, such as names, dates and locations. Anything that is not such a specific detail very likely falls under obscurity, and not security. If terrorists are aided by knowing that you monitor all Internet traffic, then frankly, they were idiots before and your security sucks badly if that knowledge makes such a difference.
Two, security or accountability, pick one. Only a totalitarian government can keep secrets, a democracy is accountable to its citizen. So either you turn the country into a tryranny, or you tell your citzen what the fuck you're doing with their taxpayer money.
If people at Burning Man used their talents to actually do something constructive
Most of what makes up culture is non-constructive. Religion, art, social events of all kinds, customs and traditions, stories, songs, the list goes on.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so quick in discounting them, even though the effect of Steve's passing has been quite obvious.
But Apple never was a one-man show, even though he took the spotlight. From all I know, Steve's strength was not in designing or creating anything, but in inspiring others and, most importantly, his ability to cut through the crap to the core issues and to kill anything that sucked. Where other companies spend time and resources on bad products (and sometimes even bring them to market), Steve would just kill it brutally with a few words and everyone could go back to making something good.
It doesn't have to be "incredibly smart". It just has to be smart in the right places.
The original iPhone didn't really do anything that wasn't available elsewhere already. But it bundled the proper things together in the proper way and had the proper design to make it all work well. I had owned several PDAs before, but the iPhone was the PDA I had always wanted.
Same for the watch. My bet is that while everyone else is working on cramming as much crap into the watch as possible. Apple is busy making sure there is no crap on it, only the right mix of the right stuff you really want on your wrist.
That is not really an internet,
In fact, that precisely is an Internet - a network of networks. All the Internet was meant to be is a connection between networks.
in fact i believe they want us to wall ourselves up. Much easier to be controlled by the state.
Never subscribe to a stupid, idiotic, brain-dead conspiracy theory when all you need is basic human psychology.
Frankly, the government is the very last people I would consider competent to run a conspiracy. They're the most incompetent, corrupt, stupid lot I've ever seen.
We really want it to be as open and trusting and chaotic as possible.
Not trusting. Chaotic and trusting don't mix. All it takes to spoil everything is one asshole who abuses you. See spam.
Despite the risks of opening yourself to abuse, it can always be corrected, when abuse is detected.
Which is why spam was a short-lived temporary issue, yes?
The Internet was built on, and runs on, trust.
And that's a fundamental flaw and a stupid mistake, as we learn again and again and again. Whether it's spam, the dominance and abuse of certain large players, the commercial takeover, or now the surveilance state.
Never built a relationship with parties you don't know personally on trust.
Never.
Ever.
Humans are inherently cooperative with peers, and competitive with everyone else. Your trust will be abused.
Bruce is right, but he misses the scope of the problem. If we want to take back the Internet, not just from the NSA, but also from Google, Facebook, the spammers, the scammers, the media industry and the corporate interest, we need to completely re-engineer it on a different fundamental concept.
One of self-interest.
One based on the assumption that the other side to a data exchange is hostile.
One assuming that intermediates can not be trusted.
90% of this Internets problems would be wiped out if we were to re-design it with an assumption of hostility.
That's hard to swallow for us geeks. Most of us have grown up in a hostile world we barely understand. With people bullying you at school, then exploiting you in the workplace, meanwhile egomanic idiots who are good at fooling people and nothing else take all the credit. So we have a deep desire for a more friendly world. Building that ourselves was a dream. It was incredibly cool while it lasted. Now it's time to wake up.
You can use encryption. That's pretty common for botnet malware, their owners have the same issue, they want your computer, but they don't want to open it to the competition. In fact, some of them will even patch the vulnerability that allowed them access, so others can't take over the machine.
Glad to hear that. There's been NSA paranoid around SELinux ever since it was released. I'm pretty sure no other part of Linux has been so thoroughly searched for backdoors.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Many years ago, I was one of the top SELinux guys in Europe, so allow me some remarks:
SELinux has nothing to do with cryptography.
It's an RBAC/MAC system to secure your local computer at the kernel level.
That also means most ring-0 exploits will go right past it. So backdooring SELinux is basically the same as backdooring any other Linux.
Are we 100% certain that it contains no backdoors? Nope, of course not. You never can be. Are we 100% certain that gcc doesn't contain backdoors?
If you're afraid the NSA is after you, disabling SELinux is probably the least effective action you can take. There's at least 20 other things you should be more worried about.
For open source systems, the person or persons who inserted the weak code should be identified and kicked off the project. It may just be incompetence, but that's a good reason to keep them out of security-critical areas.
You'll end up with nobody left.
Cryptography is hard. I don't think anyone in the field has a perfect track record. Kicking people out for mistakes is the most stupid thing you can do. What you need is more quality control. Crucial parts of the code need to get the OpenBSD treatment - full code review by multiple people.
What am I missing here? On what grounds does the payment handler demand business details? Heck, if my bank asked for my business plan (I own a small company), I'd tell them to sod off.
No, I don't. Both by my own experience and observation, at least here in Europe, luggage does get lost, but not on a routine basis.
But why guess when you have facts?
The most recent available report is from last year:
http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/reports/2012/September/2012SeptATCR.PDF
The average is 3.52 reports per 1,000 passengers, or 0.352%
Trouble is, far too many large companies are so arrogant, they stick to their "Fuck You!" line until their business goes to the wall.
Yes.
I fail to see the problem. A company like that should go out of business. If it happened more often, the surviving companies would be more customer-friendly, because the other ones are all done.
Frankly, we have too many small companies failing and way, way too few large ones.
So how much does the PR agency pay for a comment like that?
When someone has been a career criminal all his life, the burden of proof kind of shifts around, you know? Fool me once and all that.
That's a Euro sign up there - € - in correct UTF-8. When will /. arrive in the 21st century?
That doesn't mean that some companies aren't so egregiously bad at customer service that you wouldn't walk away from doing business with them.
Exactly. The one thing you can always do is vote with your money.
When the german Bahn AG (train company) was stupid to me about a 40ÂâÂdispute, I told them that in my business position I control a couple thousand Euros in travel budget going their way - or not. They blew me off, I told my secretary to always check alternatives and book them if they're the same or slightly more expensive from now on.
When O2 was stupid to me about my (rather small) mobile contract, I told them they could be nice to me or I'd cancel my much larger phone and DSL contracts as well. They didn't listen, so I move all my business elsewhere. When I got the usualy retention call, I told them why.
It is unlikely that your move will get as much attention and most likely it'll all get lost at the customer service level. I used #o2sucks on plenty of my FB postings while the above crap was going down, but I don't think it got very much attention.
But someone has to start. And if you move your business away from the crap companies, they won't even notice. But if a thousand people like you do it, they'll start to notice. And if ten or a hundred thousand do it, they just might smarten up. And if they don't, they might go belly up and good riddance. But someone has to start, so be that someone.
If airlines would get 99% of the luggage right, that would mean several pieces of luggage lost every flight.
I'm pretty sure their percentage numbers are quite good, but since passenger numbers are high, especially in the US where you need to fly virtually everywhere, the total numbers add up. Plus a lost piece of luggage is usually more of a problem than a lost Fedex package.
No system is perfect, and for systems like these, there is a business-optimal point where the cost of increasing the reliability further is higher than the cost of losing or misplacing some luggage.
That's the real reason behind regulations like the 200 âÂthey have to pay airline customers in the EU for delays of over 2 hours. It's not about giving the customer money, it's about giving the airlines an incentive to be on time.
And it works. I had two flights this year that were massively delayed, but arrived at just under the 2 hour mark. One was 1:53 delayed, not kidding. (Condor, btw., worst airline I've ever flown, won't fly it again)
Does anyone actually trust his stuff?
Idiots with no knowledge of history.
Kimble ratted his partners out to the FBI when he was under investigation for a previous crime some years ago. Once a traitor, always a traitor. If you think there are no closed-doors talks between Kimble who's trying to save his neck and the government, you must be very naive indeed. And the obvious thing that Kimble can offer is - the users of Mega, of course.
he hasn't shown "the right attitude" and that is the main and real reason why he is being persecuted now.
If you aren't a paid shill, you should change that. Your misleading and faulty argument surely qualifies, and you'd have to be an idiot to think that a multi-millionaire scam artist in the public spotlight would not have hired a PR agency to improve his online image.
Kimble is a career criminal, simple as that. He was prosecuted and even convicted before, and by several other governments. That distinct sound you're hearing is the shattered pieces of your argument falling apart.
If you are a large-scale career criminal, there are two paths you can go.
One, you can fly under the radar, like the people in the famous train robberies and serial bank breaks that many of us have heard about but almost nobody can name even one of the actual people involved.
Two, you can scale it up so much that it becomes quasi-legal by sheer scale and being-part-of-the-system, like the financial industry, the corporate corruption or the various pet-sectors of the various countries that are untouchable (Spain had a huge real estate scandal - nobody was ever convicted. Germany even has a name for the network of corporations, banks and government entities so closely connected that they all protect each other: Deutschland AG. In Greece, the shipping industry was holy for decades. In the US it is probably the military industry, and so on).
Kimble was arrogant and self-obsessed enough to think he could reach the same place simply by having an overblown ego and being audacious.
What is preventing these persons from also taking money from criminal organizations or other governments for the products of their expertise?
How about working for the secret service of a government that has demonstrated that it isn't above killing people without trial if it thinks they're a danger?
I wouldn't want to be on the shitlist of the NSA, not for a year or so worth of salary. Snowden had a motivation that goes way beyond money. You'd need something like that.
Morons there is no such thing as an exclusive back door. Once you broken the security of other countries networks, you leave access for anyone waiting to exploit, bet anything you like those morons did not at all to monitor and ensure those back doors were not exploited by others.
That's not true.
We know of malware that not only uses keyed and encrypted command channels, but also patches the hole it came through. You see, lots of criminals have also decided that once your computers is theirs, it should stay theirs and not fall to the next competitor coming along.
It's not that hard to do. Remember that this is a mainstream media article, so the technical details are dumbed down.
Malware that stores a re-install copy of itself in a hidden location isn't news. That they speak of "implants" to survive equipment upgrades leads me to believe they mean the whole thing, not an individual installation. This could be as easy as the malware instances monitoring each other and re-infecting remotely if one instance goes away. Again, at least conceptually that is 10+ years old. It's a nice feat if they pulled it off in practice, but it's not magic.
Scientists do not directly produce money, which is why their contributions are so easily overlooked.
The finance industry, on the other hand, very directly produces money, it practically prints it ever since the various regulations were all abandoned. That's why their importance is so dramatically overstated. (seriously, "too big to fail"? You kidding me? Anyone who believed that for a minute is too dumb for this planet).
It's all part of a culture problem that values appearance more than substance (marketing vs. production) and immediate profit more than long-term profitability (quarterly focus).
Good requirement. When I'm paying a premium rate billed per minute, I really want to have to spend 20-30 seconds listening to a recorded message telling me how much I'm paying...
Might differ per country, but in my country, that message must be free by law, so you are only starting to pay after it has played.
Unfortunately for both him and us, the information that helps citizen decide if their government is working in their interest or corrupt, or working at all and the information that outside forces need to evaluate possible holes in the governments security efforts can overlap quite a bit.
So yes, many leaks that are in the interest of the public will also serve the evil terrorist-pedophile-foreigner-evildoers (interesting idea: Take a publication from the height of the Cold War and replace "communist" with "terrorist" - my guess is you could publish a good part of them with that change today and nobody would notice they were written 30 years ago).
Anyways - there are two lessons here that politicians have not and never will understand, because few people who work outside the security industry do, even if you repeat it to them a hundred times:
One, security through obscurity isn't security. There are some secrets that really are secrets - almost always, they are very specific details, such as names, dates and locations. Anything that is not such a specific detail very likely falls under obscurity, and not security. If terrorists are aided by knowing that you monitor all Internet traffic, then frankly, they were idiots before and your security sucks badly if that knowledge makes such a difference.
Two, security or accountability, pick one. Only a totalitarian government can keep secrets, a democracy is accountable to its citizen. So either you turn the country into a tryranny, or you tell your citzen what the fuck you're doing with their taxpayer money.
If people at Burning Man used their talents to actually do something constructive
Most of what makes up culture is non-constructive. Religion, art, social events of all kinds, customs and traditions, stories, songs, the list goes on.