I assume that Homeopathy would have the same influence as any other placebo in treating those problems.
Which means that it does not work, because the medical definition of "work" for a drug is that it performs better than a placebo by a statistically significant margin.
Ignoring the ethical arguments, there has been fascinating research into placebos recently published. We are starting to learn that different kinds of placebos have different effects. Colours, size, type, etc. all seem to have statistically significant effects. Homeopathy exploits nothing of that.
More importantly, homeopathy is expensive as hell. The cost to the NHS is unjustified. Again, putting ethical arguments aside, if they wanted to use placebos to achieve goals, they could do so at a tiny fraction of the cost of homeopathic nonsense pseudo-drugs.
There is plenty. Control groups improve better than untreated. Why? Placebo effect.
That is what is meant by "does not work" in the context of medicine, but of course you know what. There are two tests that a new drug needs to succeed in. One: It must work better than a placebo. If it passes that test, then it can be said to actually have an effect. Two: It must either work better than or as good as but with fewer side-effects compared to the best currently available drug. Because, after all, if you already have a drug with a, say, 80% effectiveness available, why the heck would you pay for a new drug with a 60% effectiveness?
Homeopathy now means "natural treatment", not the original definition.
No, it doesn't. It still means, in the words of Tim Minchin, "water that somehow remembers a long-lost drop of onion juice, but forgets about all the poo it's had in it".
Its proponents just dodge questions here and there because the non-stupid ones all know that it's a scam. So together with a bunch of other scam it's been re-labeled as "CAM" or "natural remedies" or some such nonsense grouping. It's pure defense - any argument you bring against something in the group can be refuted by a different example from the group. So if you say CAM has no medinical effect, the homeopath will quote some natural medicine that does (but it is expensive and unreliable). If you point out the side-effects, he will say that homeopathy has been proven to be side-effect free (effect-free, too, but he won't say that), and so on. It's a set-up, a whack-a-mole invitation. Don't fall for it. CAM is scam, all of it. Again, in the words of Tim Minchin: "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proven to work?... Medicine."
Homeopathy does not work, by the standard definition of "work" used by the health professions.
You make an interesting, but unsubstantiated, claim. It works on the hidden assumption that idiots put in charge is the exception and in general, the people in charge are not idiots.
I fail to see how you can support that assumption.
You want your privacy, but you aren't willing to pay, work or take a risk for it.
I've been taken to court for standing up for my rights, and I've worked for years with civil liberties groups, among other things. I'm not a hero, tons of people do more than I do. But if everyone did as much as I have done, we would be living in a different world.
Take a fucking risk for what you want. Doesn't anyone realize that all the whining and complaining in forums and newspaper comment sections is part of the problem? If that is all it takes for you to vent your anger, then you don't have any left to actually change something.
When it's about guns, the general attitude on/. is that guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Now, when it's digital, it is suddenly the technology itself that is evil?
Having a lot of cognitive dissonance today, haven't we?
All of this has up and downsides. Location tracking can mean that people who shouldn't know where you are. It can also mean the ambulance can find you when you've had an accident and are unable to tell them where you crashed.
Most importantly, and once again this is something that is argued all the time here on/. when it's about things we like, such as breaking the lame-ass encryption of DVDs or other DRM, the genie is out of the bottle. The technology to track you exists. No wishful thinking will make it un-exist.
The proper point of attack is making sure it isn't abused. Before we can do that effectively, however, we need to take back our government, or alternatively shoot the corrupt bastards and put people in charge that aren't bought by ten different lobby groups already. For that to happen, we need to change the way our political system works and we need to take person rights away from corporations and we need to change our social wealth distribution so that a few very wealthy individuals can't outspend half of the population.
And here I was thinking I would not have to point out Datamining 101 items to the/. crowd. *sigh*
The checkout only registers this particular purchase. The discount card is what allows them to link this purchase with the one you did on Monday and the one you did last week and all the others. Obviously, a connected set of purchases linked to a particular individual are a lot more informative than discreet sets of purchases with no links between them.
They want the chance to upsell you on other items (those handy coupons that auto print when you check out).
That must be a local thing in your area. Over here, I've never seen that happen in any of the shops I visit.
They also want to get other data from you, such as age, zipcode, address... They also use that data to then sell to other data miners...
Yes, of course, as well as making the data above more valuable because now they can also analyse it by demographic data, etc.
Still doesn't mean that anyone will ever look at your particular data set and say "tsk, that John Doe is buying an awful lot of chocolate".
I understand that, as you can see if you finish reading my post. I simply don't see why allowing a peek into my shopping profile should automatically lead to a dossier about me, a particular shopper, rather than an anonymous profile of a class of shopper.
Because that is the deal you sign when you sign up for that that discount card. If you don't like it, then don't do it. It really is that simple.
Now if you want to have your cake and it it, too - then that's what I consider whining. Either your privacy is worth the few bucks you pay more than the guy who does a virtual strip every shopping trip, or it isn't.
Good for you. I assume that you feel you don't need to worry about your privacy right now because of your particular situation, so you don't care about other's privacy or what will happen when your own particular circumstances change.
I maintain that you have a choice. Sure, sometimes that choice is more difficult (like when you don't have much money, those few bucks might really matter), but as long as it isn't a law, you can still decide this way or that.
What I consider dishonest is wanting to get the discount without disclosing your data. You can dislike the deal, but then don't make it.
So you're already modifying your behavior instead of pushing back. You've already given up.
On the contrary, I am one of the few people who have not modified their shopping behaviour at all after the discount cards have been introduced. I still shop the same way I did 10 or 15 years ago.
You're just trying to win cookie points by insisting on an argument you can't maintain.
You may not realize how many other ways you are tracked and measured every day.
Assumptions again. I've been prosecuted for standing up for my rights, I own an EFF T-Shirt that I didn't pay for but got as a present from them for some things I did for them. I've had my share in founding a european online civil rights movement. I think I am pretty aware of what's going on in regards to privacy and monitoring.
But I don't worry about the ridiculous stuff. I don't worry about NFC chips because I know what the "N" stands for. I pay attention to where I use my credit card and where I pay cash, making a conscious decision of the advantages and disadvantages. I buy music on iTunes, but I only started doing so after they dropped the DRM crap.
You see, the world is not black and white, it's not a heroic fight vs. rolling over. It's making decisions about your life.
I don't own or use any of those coupo/discount cards. I'd rather pay the 2% or whatever more and keep my shopping habbits, thank you.
I also don't own a car. I rent one when I need one. It's cheaper for me because I only need one every few weeks (I live in a big city).
So don't assume anything about me when you don't know.
In the case of your supermarket savings card scenario, why should i have to choose between privacy and saving a couple of bucks?
Because those bucks are not "saved" - they are the payment that you get for sharing your data with the supermarket company.
Collecting the marketing data should pay for the savings, the opportunity to investigate my non-anonymized shopping habits is the problem.
Your data is worth more non-anonymized. If there were a strong enough movement instead of just a few geeks that demands anonymous discount cards, I'm sure they would emerge. Maybe you'd only save 1% instead of 2% on them, but I can't imagine it not happening, because the data is worth more (if it weren't, they wouldn't be paying you).
Why is non-anonymized data worth more? Read the small print where it details what you allow them to do with your data.
(accident detection isn't that hard: hard breaking, impact, strange manoeuvring, etc)
It isn't hard until you try to actually write code that details what exactly counts as "strange maneuvering", for example. Then it becomes not only hard, but filled with legal trouble. If you record too little, people will whine. If you record too much, people will whine. Basically, no matter what you do, it'll be wrong.
I agree with the use of having a log of what happened just before an accident, but there is no need to keep all the data of all your trips at all times just because an accident might happen. And most people luckily can drive for many years without being involved in an accident.
Agreed on that, but here's a much simpler solution: Keep the data with the car. Encrypt it and store the recovery key with the car papers in your home. Law enforcement has the usual ways of forcing you to hand over the keys in case of an accident, but the data can't be accessed by data collectors just because they can.
Insurance companies will want the record. See, there's a difference between the way human and computer memory works: Humans do tend to remember events outside the ordinary. You can drive for six hours and have almost no recollection of any of it, but the two minutes of the accident will be burnt into your mind. A computer doesn't attribute any meaning to events. To him, the sudden deceleration and then the even more sudden deceleration and impact event are just data. Unless you specifically tell it beforehand what kind of events to record, it'll RR that data out of memory just like the previous six hours.
So the simple solution is to have it record everything and in the case of a crash let people worry about which data is meaningful - we do that already for planes.
Random IDs would have to be long to make sure that there is a sufficiently low chance of collisions. Globally unique IDs are easy - we use them in network adapters already - and they remove that headache entirely.
There are things worth fighting for because you want them accepted, and there are things that are simply nobody's business. Or at least not your business. If a friend of mine were to ask me who slept over at my place this night, I'd tell him without hesitation - nothing to hide. But why should I tell a stranger?
That's the strawman the "nothing to hide" crowd uses. They paint privacy as a black-or-white matter. But it isn't. Every single one of us has things that he prefers to not be public knowledge, without them being illegal or anything - they are just, well, private.
Thought to remember: Next time someone tells you that you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, ask them how often they have anal sex with their wife. If they hesitate to answer, ask them what terrorist plot they are trying to hide.
has the potential to store everyones movements, forever.
*sigh* People who know nothing about privacy worrying about privacy...
No, it does not store anyones' movements. It stores an ID chips movements. Ten years ago there was a panel discussion about the coupon cards (or whatever you call them in your part of the world) that were just emerging. You know, these PayBack and whatever "customer cards" that give you a few % off if you put them down when shopping? And which, of course, log your shopping habbits and send them back to some big database to be datamined? I'm fairly confident (and said so) that the company doesn't give a flying fuck about you, they are looking for large patterns - e.g. x% of people who buy A are also buying B so maybe we should move the locations of A and B in the shop around.
However, there was a simple solution to the privacy problem that I suggested and that was immediately executed by a few people in the audience: Stand up and exchange your card with someone else. Repeat every now and then.
So you are worried that someone is tracking your car? Talk to your neighbour. Drive his car for a week while he drives yours. Borrow a car from a friend for your trip down to the local strip club. Switch cars with your wife more often. Of stop owning a car and rent one every now and then.
Sure, it isn't as simple as exchanging a card, but do you really care about privacy or are you just whining?
Can we please start fining a lack of common sense? So these people at least pay for all the extra costs to society, and evolution can slowly start selecting against them?
Part of it is common sense, part of it is bad design and bad technology and lots and lots of bad on our end.
I have a nice slide that I use in my presentations on the subject. I don't think I need it here on/. - picture your typical phishing e-mail displayed in your typical e-mail app. Here's your problem:
Everything that invites you to click on that link, fall for that scam, make that mistake, is in the center of your field of vision, big, in colour, drawing your attention. Psychology at work.
Everything that warns you about impeding doom, informs you about what's going on and helps you steer clear of that danger is small, black-on-grey or otherwise inconspicuous, at the edge of the window if it isn't outright hidden.
There's your problem. In your normal operating modus, where you don't suspect someone is trying to scam you, where your mind is on other things, your problem is in your mind, not in the computer. Phishers know that and exploit it. Telling users to "not click those links" is like telling a hungry kid in a candy store to ignore all the sweets. It ignores basic facts of human signal processing.
As a matter of fact, at least one study concluded that IT professionals score only marginally better at phishing detection than average users (within the margin of error, I believe), and IT security professionals just slightly better again.
It's not a matter of "we are doing it right, they are stupid".
Your counter-argument is flawed because it does ignore the emergence and education of new users, which due to the constant growth of Internet access has been a major factor that you can not ignore.
User education, at least as it is being done at this time, is deeply flawed and very inefficient. It is not entirely ineffective, but the amount of effort compared to the gain is ridiculous. I am aware that many people in the industry disagree with me. Interestingly, most of them have things like "user awareness training" in their portfolio. It's a great money-maker, exactly because it is inefficient and because it needs to be repeated regularily, etc. etc.
Same for Phishing. "tell the user to..." shifts blame, saves us from doing any actual research and allows us to sell overpriced, inefficient training courses.
If it would work, we would see a considerable decline in phishing activities and success, because we (i.e. the IT security industry) have been telling that line to users for about a decade now.
All the statistics I have available show no such decline. The Verizon data breach report is publicly available and has been saying on and off for many years that phishing is still an issue, is getting bigger, is not decreasing as much as everyone had hoped, etc. etc.
Fact: Phishing still works enough to be a big industry. Fact: We've been saying "don't click on e-mail links" to users for 10+ years. Fact: The IQ 100 median norm has slightly increased during that time.
Conclusion: People are dumb is not a sufficient answer.
Addendum: Humanity has used lots and lots and lots of stuff in its history that didn't work. Raindances, homeopathy, coins for the ferryman, need I go on?
If you want document editing on a tablet, look at the iwork suite that Apple ported to the iPad. While they load and save the same document format, the UI is very different. That's how you do it, not some half-assed piss-poor port.
I was thinking more on the lines of a programming editor, with syntax-highlighting etc.
They exist, but you'll have to search for them yourself, as I don't use one, so I can't recommend any.
Aside: a neat thing to do would be to support a whole VM running in the background, connected to the display via VNC. This sounds inefficient, but it works surprisingly well - you can run a full Debian system on a Zaurus that way!
There are VNC clients and other remote desktops (teamview, xdisplay, etc.) - why I would want to run something that was even less designed for the device (touch interface, etc.) in a VM is beyond me. Sure, if you challenge me I might be tempted to demonstrate that it can be done, but for actual productive work?
So, the first thing we did against phishing is still working...
No, it isn't. For a lot of people it doesn't. It may work for you and me because we understand the technology, but it doesn't for millions of users who don't.
The issues in phishing are multiple - I've given speeches about some of them - and "don't click those links" as a "solution" is about as good as telling smokers to "just quit already" - there is a small fraction on which that actually works, but for most people it doesn't.
They were originally implemented to contain data inside documents where you need everything to be contained in one file - such as early e-mail systems.
Whatever may or may not be true in regards to IE security, this particular vulnerability does not work on IE because it has a length limit on data URIs, not because anyone thought of it and secured it against it. It's accidental. Chrome is the browser that has an actual security feature preventing this attack.
They don't. It's a phishing attack, its intent is to get you to enter your password to some interesting site on a fake of that site. Afterwards, they'd redirect you to the real one or show a bogus error message, and then loot your account there.
One attack vector against phishing attacks has been to take the site down where the fake is hosted. If the bad guys don't have to host the fake anymore because it is entirely self-contained in the phishing mail you send out through their botnet, then there is one less thing we can do against phishing.
Come back after you've seen it and post whatever you want. Once you have an informed opinion, I will consider it. Just posting general whining with no knowledge what I'm even talking about is just stupid.
but if you've ever used ssh + passphrases + rsync, you'll know that it's not a patch on that
I use that every day. If you are concerned about encryption, you can use Wuala instead of Dropbox.
why would I shift several GB up into the cloud and back again, when it should be possible to just copy directly?
Convenience. Dropbox is just a folder on my iMac, I don't need to copy anything, I just keep stuff I want available on all my devices in that folder. Being able to just save and not worry about syncing is really great. Again, depending on context. For my live web-apps I prefer the above mentioned explicit sync because that way I can control when exactly changes go live. But for some documents, not having to worry about it is really cool.
many X applications wouldn't work well with a touch screen, but many of them would work.
Sorry, no. I've been writing some iPad and iPhone software, including ports of a few small games I originally made for the desktop. Nothing that is not designed with touch in mind will work really well on a touchscreen. You need to enlarge buttons, shift stuff around to make missed less consequential, move controls around so fingers don't cover up stuff you want to read, etc. etc. There's a lot more to it than just gesture controls. Want a quick check on the difference? Pick up an iPad and visit any moderately complex website. Forums are great examples - they work horribly on the iPad because most of the links are too close together and you constantly click on stuff you didn't mean.
Besides which, an iPad with optional bluetooth mouse and keyboard might be a genuine replacement for a laptop.
Another thing I don't get. Why would you want to pimp up your iPad to become a laptop when you could just as easily buy, you know, a laptop? Isn't that like buying a Porsche and then replacing half the parts because you need a family car for in-town driving? And I thought Unix people above all would understand using the right tool for the right job.
There isn't even a good text editor or shell on there.
Plaintext works for me, but there are tons of others. Many of the good ones are paid apps, which you might object to on principle, but there are quite a few text editors that get great reviews.
For "shell" it depends on what you mean. There's no local shell because there's no point to it. For remote shells, there are quite a few SSH programs, several of which get good reviews. I personally have zaTelnet installed, but it's so-so. It's probably one of the better free choices and since I use it once a quarter or so, I don't feel like paying for something.
True, not everything is available. I'd still love for Scrivener to be ported to the iPad because I use it on my iMac and I would love to be able to edit my Scrivener documents while on the road. But those are specific programs and you can say the same for any other platform (Scrivener was Mac-only for many years, so you could've complained the same as a windows user!).
First, there are no laws higher than human laws, period. Fortunately, good lawmakers have known that for a long time. The Constitution says "self-evident", not god-given or such drivel. The UN declaration of human rights makes no reference to a higher power, either.
Second, they are HUMAN rights. Taking them away from the non-humans that have begun to rule our world, such as corporations, institutions and foundations, is the first step towards human freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume that Homeopathy would have the same influence as any other placebo in treating those problems.
Which means that it does not work, because the medical definition of "work" for a drug is that it performs better than a placebo by a statistically significant margin.
Actually, it isn't even genius as a scam.
Ignoring the ethical arguments, there has been fascinating research into placebos recently published. We are starting to learn that different kinds of placebos have different effects. Colours, size, type, etc. all seem to have statistically significant effects. Homeopathy exploits nothing of that.
More importantly, homeopathy is expensive as hell. The cost to the NHS is unjustified. Again, putting ethical arguments aside, if they wanted to use placebos to achieve goals, they could do so at a tiny fraction of the cost of homeopathic nonsense pseudo-drugs.
There is plenty. Control groups improve better than untreated. Why? Placebo effect.
That is what is meant by "does not work" in the context of medicine, but of course you know what. There are two tests that a new drug needs to succeed in. One: It must work better than a placebo. If it passes that test, then it can be said to actually have an effect. Two: It must either work better than or as good as but with fewer side-effects compared to the best currently available drug. Because, after all, if you already have a drug with a, say, 80% effectiveness available, why the heck would you pay for a new drug with a 60% effectiveness?
Homeopathy now means "natural treatment", not the original definition.
No, it doesn't. It still means, in the words of Tim Minchin, "water that somehow remembers a long-lost drop of onion juice, but forgets about all the poo it's had in it".
Its proponents just dodge questions here and there because the non-stupid ones all know that it's a scam. So together with a bunch of other scam it's been re-labeled as "CAM" or "natural remedies" or some such nonsense grouping. It's pure defense - any argument you bring against something in the group can be refuted by a different example from the group. So if you say CAM has no medinical effect, the homeopath will quote some natural medicine that does (but it is expensive and unreliable). If you point out the side-effects, he will say that homeopathy has been proven to be side-effect free (effect-free, too, but he won't say that), and so on. It's a set-up, a whack-a-mole invitation. Don't fall for it. CAM is scam, all of it. Again, in the words of Tim Minchin: "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proven to work? ... Medicine."
Homeopathy does not work, by the standard definition of "work" used by the health professions.
You make an interesting, but unsubstantiated, claim. It works on the hidden assumption that idiots put in charge is the exception and in general, the people in charge are not idiots.
I fail to see how you can support that assumption.
That's what I call whining.
You want your privacy, but you aren't willing to pay, work or take a risk for it.
I've been taken to court for standing up for my rights, and I've worked for years with civil liberties groups, among other things. I'm not a hero, tons of people do more than I do. But if everyone did as much as I have done, we would be living in a different world.
Take a fucking risk for what you want. Doesn't anyone realize that all the whining and complaining in forums and newspaper comment sections is part of the problem? If that is all it takes for you to vent your anger, then you don't have any left to actually change something.
When it's about guns, the general attitude on /. is that guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Now, when it's digital, it is suddenly the technology itself that is evil?
Having a lot of cognitive dissonance today, haven't we?
All of this has up and downsides. Location tracking can mean that people who shouldn't know where you are. It can also mean the ambulance can find you when you've had an accident and are unable to tell them where you crashed.
Most importantly, and once again this is something that is argued all the time here on /. when it's about things we like, such as breaking the lame-ass encryption of DVDs or other DRM, the genie is out of the bottle. The technology to track you exists. No wishful thinking will make it un-exist.
The proper point of attack is making sure it isn't abused. Before we can do that effectively, however, we need to take back our government, or alternatively shoot the corrupt bastards and put people in charge that aren't bought by ten different lobby groups already. For that to happen, we need to change the way our political system works and we need to take person rights away from corporations and we need to change our social wealth distribution so that a few very wealthy individuals can't outspend half of the population.
They scan every item to check you out...
And here I was thinking I would not have to point out Datamining 101 items to the /. crowd. *sigh*
The checkout only registers this particular purchase. The discount card is what allows them to link this purchase with the one you did on Monday and the one you did last week and all the others. Obviously, a connected set of purchases linked to a particular individual are a lot more informative than discreet sets of purchases with no links between them.
They want the chance to upsell you on other items (those handy coupons that auto print when you check out).
That must be a local thing in your area. Over here, I've never seen that happen in any of the shops I visit.
They also want to get other data from you, such as age, zipcode, address... They also use that data to then sell to other data miners...
Yes, of course, as well as making the data above more valuable because now they can also analyse it by demographic data, etc.
Still doesn't mean that anyone will ever look at your particular data set and say "tsk, that John Doe is buying an awful lot of chocolate".
I understand that, as you can see if you finish reading my post. I simply don't see why allowing a peek into my shopping profile should automatically lead to a dossier about me, a particular shopper, rather than an anonymous profile of a class of shopper.
Because that is the deal you sign when you sign up for that that discount card. If you don't like it, then don't do it. It really is that simple.
Now if you want to have your cake and it it, too - then that's what I consider whining. Either your privacy is worth the few bucks you pay more than the guy who does a virtual strip every shopping trip, or it isn't.
Good for you. I assume that you feel you don't need to worry about your privacy right now because of your particular situation, so you don't care about other's privacy or what will happen when your own particular circumstances change.
I maintain that you have a choice. Sure, sometimes that choice is more difficult (like when you don't have much money, those few bucks might really matter), but as long as it isn't a law, you can still decide this way or that.
What I consider dishonest is wanting to get the discount without disclosing your data. You can dislike the deal, but then don't make it.
So you're already modifying your behavior instead of pushing back. You've already given up.
On the contrary, I am one of the few people who have not modified their shopping behaviour at all after the discount cards have been introduced. I still shop the same way I did 10 or 15 years ago.
You're just trying to win cookie points by insisting on an argument you can't maintain.
You may not realize how many other ways you are tracked and measured every day.
Assumptions again. I've been prosecuted for standing up for my rights, I own an EFF T-Shirt that I didn't pay for but got as a present from them for some things I did for them. I've had my share in founding a european online civil rights movement. I think I am pretty aware of what's going on in regards to privacy and monitoring.
But I don't worry about the ridiculous stuff. I don't worry about NFC chips because I know what the "N" stands for. I pay attention to where I use my credit card and where I pay cash, making a conscious decision of the advantages and disadvantages. I buy music on iTunes, but I only started doing so after they dropped the DRM crap.
You see, the world is not black and white, it's not a heroic fight vs. rolling over. It's making decisions about your life.
You've already given up and rolled over.
You are quick with the assumptions.
I don't own or use any of those coupo/discount cards. I'd rather pay the 2% or whatever more and keep my shopping habbits, thank you.
I also don't own a car. I rent one when I need one. It's cheaper for me because I only need one every few weeks (I live in a big city).
So don't assume anything about me when you don't know.
In the case of your supermarket savings card scenario, why should i have to choose between privacy and saving a couple of bucks?
Because those bucks are not "saved" - they are the payment that you get for sharing your data with the supermarket company.
Collecting the marketing data should pay for the savings, the opportunity to investigate my non-anonymized shopping habits is the problem.
Your data is worth more non-anonymized. If there were a strong enough movement instead of just a few geeks that demands anonymous discount cards, I'm sure they would emerge. Maybe you'd only save 1% instead of 2% on them, but I can't imagine it not happening, because the data is worth more (if it weren't, they wouldn't be paying you).
Why is non-anonymized data worth more? Read the small print where it details what you allow them to do with your data.
(accident detection isn't that hard: hard breaking, impact, strange manoeuvring, etc)
It isn't hard until you try to actually write code that details what exactly counts as "strange maneuvering", for example. Then it becomes not only hard, but filled with legal trouble. If you record too little, people will whine. If you record too much, people will whine. Basically, no matter what you do, it'll be wrong.
I agree with the use of having a log of what happened just before an accident, but there is no need to keep all the data of all your trips at all times just because an accident might happen. And most people luckily can drive for many years without being involved in an accident.
Agreed on that, but here's a much simpler solution: Keep the data with the car. Encrypt it and store the recovery key with the car papers in your home. Law enforcement has the usual ways of forcing you to hand over the keys in case of an accident, but the data can't be accessed by data collectors just because they can.
Insurance companies will want the record. See, there's a difference between the way human and computer memory works: Humans do tend to remember events outside the ordinary. You can drive for six hours and have almost no recollection of any of it, but the two minutes of the accident will be burnt into your mind.
A computer doesn't attribute any meaning to events. To him, the sudden deceleration and then the even more sudden deceleration and impact event are just data. Unless you specifically tell it beforehand what kind of events to record, it'll RR that data out of memory just like the previous six hours.
So the simple solution is to have it record everything and in the case of a crash let people worry about which data is meaningful - we do that already for planes.
Random IDs would have to be long to make sure that there is a sufficiently low chance of collisions. Globally unique IDs are easy - we use them in network adapters already - and they remove that headache entirely.
There are things worth fighting for because you want them accepted, and there are things that are simply nobody's business. Or at least not your business. If a friend of mine were to ask me who slept over at my place this night, I'd tell him without hesitation - nothing to hide. But why should I tell a stranger?
That's the strawman the "nothing to hide" crowd uses. They paint privacy as a black-or-white matter. But it isn't. Every single one of us has things that he prefers to not be public knowledge, without them being illegal or anything - they are just, well, private.
Thought to remember: Next time someone tells you that you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, ask them how often they have anal sex with their wife. If they hesitate to answer, ask them what terrorist plot they are trying to hide.
has the potential to store everyones movements, forever.
*sigh* People who know nothing about privacy worrying about privacy...
No, it does not store anyones' movements. It stores an ID chips movements. Ten years ago there was a panel discussion about the coupon cards (or whatever you call them in your part of the world) that were just emerging. You know, these PayBack and whatever "customer cards" that give you a few % off if you put them down when shopping? And which, of course, log your shopping habbits and send them back to some big database to be datamined? I'm fairly confident (and said so) that the company doesn't give a flying fuck about you, they are looking for large patterns - e.g. x% of people who buy A are also buying B so maybe we should move the locations of A and B in the shop around.
However, there was a simple solution to the privacy problem that I suggested and that was immediately executed by a few people in the audience: Stand up and exchange your card with someone else. Repeat every now and then.
So you are worried that someone is tracking your car? Talk to your neighbour. Drive his car for a week while he drives yours. Borrow a car from a friend for your trip down to the local strip club. Switch cars with your wife more often. Of stop owning a car and rent one every now and then.
Sure, it isn't as simple as exchanging a card, but do you really care about privacy or are you just whining?
Can we please start fining a lack of common sense? So these people at least pay for all the extra costs to society, and evolution can slowly start selecting against them?
Part of it is common sense, part of it is bad design and bad technology and lots and lots of bad on our end.
I have a nice slide that I use in my presentations on the subject. I don't think I need it here on /. - picture your typical phishing e-mail displayed in your typical e-mail app. Here's your problem:
Everything that invites you to click on that link, fall for that scam, make that mistake, is in the center of your field of vision, big, in colour, drawing your attention. Psychology at work.
Everything that warns you about impeding doom, informs you about what's going on and helps you steer clear of that danger is small, black-on-grey or otherwise inconspicuous, at the edge of the window if it isn't outright hidden.
There's your problem. In your normal operating modus, where you don't suspect someone is trying to scam you, where your mind is on other things, your problem is in your mind, not in the computer. Phishers know that and exploit it. Telling users to "not click those links" is like telling a hungry kid in a candy store to ignore all the sweets. It ignores basic facts of human signal processing.
As a matter of fact, at least one study concluded that IT professionals score only marginally better at phishing detection than average users (within the margin of error, I believe), and IT security professionals just slightly better again.
It's not a matter of "we are doing it right, they are stupid".
Your counter-argument is flawed because it does ignore the emergence and education of new users, which due to the constant growth of Internet access has been a major factor that you can not ignore.
User education, at least as it is being done at this time, is deeply flawed and very inefficient. It is not entirely ineffective, but the amount of effort compared to the gain is ridiculous. I am aware that many people in the industry disagree with me. Interestingly, most of them have things like "user awareness training" in their portfolio. It's a great money-maker, exactly because it is inefficient and because it needs to be repeated regularily, etc. etc.
Same for Phishing. "tell the user to ..." shifts blame, saves us from doing any actual research and allows us to sell overpriced, inefficient training courses.
Interesting. Then Wikipedia and TFA are at odds regarding their claims regarding IE data support. Thanks for the correction.
If it would work, we would see a considerable decline in phishing activities and success, because we (i.e. the IT security industry) have been telling that line to users for about a decade now.
All the statistics I have available show no such decline. The Verizon data breach report is publicly available and has been saying on and off for many years that phishing is still an issue, is getting bigger, is not decreasing as much as everyone had hoped, etc. etc.
Fact: Phishing still works enough to be a big industry.
Fact: We've been saying "don't click on e-mail links" to users for 10+ years.
Fact: The IQ 100 median norm has slightly increased during that time.
Conclusion: People are dumb is not a sufficient answer.
Addendum: Humanity has used lots and lots and lots of stuff in its history that didn't work. Raindances, homeopathy, coins for the ferryman, need I go on?
If you want document editing on a tablet, look at the iwork suite that Apple ported to the iPad. While they load and save the same document format, the UI is very different. That's how you do it, not some half-assed piss-poor port.
I was thinking more on the lines of a programming editor, with syntax-highlighting etc.
They exist, but you'll have to search for them yourself, as I don't use one, so I can't recommend any.
Aside: a neat thing to do would be to support a whole VM running in the background, connected to the display via VNC. This sounds inefficient, but it works surprisingly well - you can run a full Debian system on a Zaurus that way!
There are VNC clients and other remote desktops (teamview, xdisplay, etc.) - why I would want to run something that was even less designed for the device (touch interface, etc.) in a VM is beyond me. Sure, if you challenge me I might be tempted to demonstrate that it can be done, but for actual productive work?
So, the first thing we did against phishing is still working...
No, it isn't. For a lot of people it doesn't. It may work for you and me because we understand the technology, but it doesn't for millions of users who don't.
The issues in phishing are multiple - I've given speeches about some of them - and "don't click those links" as a "solution" is about as good as telling smokers to "just quit already" - there is a small fraction on which that actually works, but for most people it doesn't.
They were originally implemented to contain data inside documents where you need everything to be contained in one file - such as early e-mail systems.
Whatever may or may not be true in regards to IE security, this particular vulnerability does not work on IE because it has a length limit on data URIs, not because anyone thought of it and secured it against it. It's accidental. Chrome is the browser that has an actual security feature preventing this attack.
They don't. It's a phishing attack, its intent is to get you to enter your password to some interesting site on a fake of that site. Afterwards, they'd redirect you to the real one or show a bogus error message, and then loot your account there.
One attack vector against phishing attacks has been to take the site down where the fake is hosted. If the bad guys don't have to host the fake anymore because it is entirely self-contained in the phishing mail you send out through their botnet, then there is one less thing we can do against phishing.
Please take this as advice for the future:
Without having seen the video in question, you have no idea what you are talking about and should STFU.
Here's one of them (the others are in the same playlist):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANBOyeFiAKE&feature=share&list=PL9EFB5523F83D2EFD
Come back after you've seen it and post whatever you want. Once you have an informed opinion, I will consider it. Just posting general whining with no knowledge what I'm even talking about is just stupid.
but if you've ever used ssh + passphrases + rsync, you'll know that it's not a patch on that
I use that every day. If you are concerned about encryption, you can use Wuala instead of Dropbox.
why would I shift several GB up into the cloud and back again, when it should be possible to just copy directly?
Convenience. Dropbox is just a folder on my iMac, I don't need to copy anything, I just keep stuff I want available on all my devices in that folder. Being able to just save and not worry about syncing is really great. Again, depending on context. For my live web-apps I prefer the above mentioned explicit sync because that way I can control when exactly changes go live. But for some documents, not having to worry about it is really cool.
many X applications wouldn't work well with a touch screen, but many of them would work.
Sorry, no. I've been writing some iPad and iPhone software, including ports of a few small games I originally made for the desktop. Nothing that is not designed with touch in mind will work really well on a touchscreen. You need to enlarge buttons, shift stuff around to make missed less consequential, move controls around so fingers don't cover up stuff you want to read, etc. etc. There's a lot more to it than just gesture controls.
Want a quick check on the difference? Pick up an iPad and visit any moderately complex website. Forums are great examples - they work horribly on the iPad because most of the links are too close together and you constantly click on stuff you didn't mean.
Besides which, an iPad with optional bluetooth mouse and keyboard might be a genuine replacement for a laptop.
Another thing I don't get. Why would you want to pimp up your iPad to become a laptop when you could just as easily buy, you know, a laptop? Isn't that like buying a Porsche and then replacing half the parts because you need a family car for in-town driving? And I thought Unix people above all would understand using the right tool for the right job.
There isn't even a good text editor or shell on there.
Plaintext works for me, but there are tons of others. Many of the good ones are paid apps, which you might object to on principle, but there are quite a few text editors that get great reviews.
For "shell" it depends on what you mean. There's no local shell because there's no point to it. For remote shells, there are quite a few SSH programs, several of which get good reviews. I personally have zaTelnet installed, but it's so-so. It's probably one of the better free choices and since I use it once a quarter or so, I don't feel like paying for something.
True, not everything is available. I'd still love for Scrivener to be ported to the iPad because I use it on my iMac and I would love to be able to edit my Scrivener documents while on the road. But those are specific programs and you can say the same for any other platform (Scrivener was Mac-only for many years, so you could've complained the same as a windows user!).
First, there are no laws higher than human laws, period. Fortunately, good lawmakers have known that for a long time. The Constitution says "self-evident", not god-given or such drivel. The UN declaration of human rights makes no reference to a higher power, either.
Second, they are HUMAN rights. Taking them away from the non-humans that have begun to rule our world, such as corporations, institutions and foundations, is the first step towards human freedom.