This is one of those things that serves to reinforce my belief that much of the market is a Ponzi scheme, and that an IPO is a good way to fleece investors as the big guys take their cut and then get out of it.
And it took you this long to realize that?
How many small-time investors do you know that made a bucket of cash on the stock market? Don't say "nobody", I'm sure you know someone if you think about it. I'm not talking filthy-rich, but someone who doubled their investment or something.
See, told you that you'd know someone. Every casino knows it needs the occasional winner so all the other marks think they could be the next one.
Now check how much banks, hedge fonds and other big financial players make at the stock market. Yepp, pretty much all their profits. Even for many banks, unfortunately. Now if you know one thing about the stock market, it should be this: It's a zero-sum game. No money gets ever created or destroyed at the stock exchange, it only changes hands.
So where do the corporations make their money from? Same as any other business: Fools.
No, his crime was evading justice for a decade of con-jobs and borderline psychopathic behaviour. He's not a native New Zealander, did you know that? Do you know why he's no longer in Germany? Might be because everyone in the tech scene here despises him.
Justice hates it when known crooks keep running around because they manage to keep away from the stuff you can prove. Then, when they finally find something to nail you with, they come after you with vengeance. Sure, on paper the legal system works differently - but on paper you can't get away with being a criminal for a decade, either.
The guy is a crook, and everyone here who roots for him is a stupid idiot.
As a matter of fact YES he is innocent in the eyes of the law.
But that wasn't the GPs question. Kim is a sleazy con-man who has fucked over pretty much everyone who has ever been involved with him. He has a dozen reasons for no longer living in his native country (mine), all of which are morally questionable and most are related to illegal activities.
To me, as someone who hasn't learnt that name when Megaupload was busted, this sounds a lot more like Al Capone or justice finally having caught up with him. Yeah, maybe they nail him on tax evasion / copyright infringement, but everyone who knows anything about Kim knows that he deserves everything he's getting and then some.
Imagine my surprise when I loaded up Skype on my iPhone today and noticed that at the top of your contact list, it now displays an ad banner - for Internet Explorer! With an "install now" notice.
Not only did I think someone at MS might be smart enough to realize that I can't install IE on my iPhone, but I thought this is the exact anti-competitive behaviour they had been found guilty for? You know, pushing the crapware IE with their near-monopoly in other areas?
Anyone got a Skype alternative? I knew it was time to dump it when MS acquired it. It was such a nice piece of software.:-(
So yeah, the IE market share is all organic. You know, as organic as plastic wrapped in shrinkwrap foil.
When numbers change, you always need to ask what actually changed. Especially on surveys. Especially on surveys where people self-report.
The "increase" in piracy rate may well be a combination of effects, the most obvious one being an increase in the percentage of people admitting it (i.e. a reduction of the dark figure. It could be a slight decrease of actual piracy, and a large decrease of the dark figure. Or it could be a huge increase in piracy, with a decrease in people reporting it.
So, in summary, it basically tells us very little about piracy.
Not as much as people make it. Demographics has become the scapegoat, just like any economic crisis is always the scapegoat for cuts into the social systems.
There are ways to adapt the pension system to the demographics. But they aren't being explored, because the people in power don't have an interest in saving the pension system.
The main reason is that since TV sucks so badly these days, I don't own one anymore. I have a video beamer shared between my home cinema and Wii, but no cable or other TV reception. And since you can't legally buy the episodes anywhere - there could be a webcomic link here, but by now we all know the one - piratebay it is.
As soon as media companies understand that the Internet is the distribution system they've always dreamed about, they will see the light at the end of the tunnel. The music industry had to be forced to accept that fact, but right now, around 40% of all music sales already happen digitally. A few years from now, they will make more money on the evil Internet than through their old channels. Just like they once fought the VHS tooth and nail and today most movies make more with the DVD version than at the box office.
My problem with the xkcd scheme is that users are lazy and rather than pick 4 random words, they'll pick 4 words that are easy to remember in sequence: "haveityourway" "darksideofthemoon" "thesearenothtedroidsyourelookingfor", so with a phrase dictionary and some grammar rules, you still have a good chance at brute-forcing some user's passwords.
Who said the users get to pick the words?
It's trivial to have all or some of the words picked at random.
Are you saying that out of "gut feeling" (you know, the same thing that tells you the earth is flat), or have you actually clocked yourself typing in "12ol3jkh!!asrdfw9g8" or "^TFGY78UH" and compare it to typing "This chicken tastes like shit!" ?
12ol3jkh!!asrdfw9g8 - 9 seconds ^TFGY78UH - 4.8 seconds This chicken tastes like shit! - 3.4 seconds
Those are my times. I'm sure they'd come down if I would type this every day as a password. I don't know if they would come down the same, but even the garbage one were to improve twice as fast, the first one will never be faster to type than the last one. Even if it came down three times as fast (unlikely) with practice, it wouldn't, considering real-world restrictions on typing speed.
many dictionary cracking programs implement mixing of words on the list - meaning "correct horse staple battery" will be cracked in SECONDS, not centuries.
You are wrong. I actually did the math on this for a paper, and the order-of-magnitude in complexity is 10^16 - comparable with what your average password policy provides in theory. The problem being that for the reasons outlined in xkcd, my paper and many other places by now, the actual complexity of most policy-compliant passwords is actually on the order-of-magnitude of 10^7 - while even a worst-case estimate for the xkcd-style password still provides 10^12.
Can't link to the paper because it's only available in print (it's in ISBN 9-783844-806885).
Any password policy that basically forces you to write down your password somewhere is broken
That's ideology, not wisdom.
In fact, there are many real-world cases where the policy itself requires that the password is written down. For example, a company I used to work for had only a small number of admins for each system (a total of about a dozen, usually in pairs for the main systems). The risk that both of them were lost to accidents, sudden leaving or whatever was something the company didn't want to bear, so all the root passwords were written down, sealed in envelopes and put into a safe.
It was a good policy, and it actually saved us more than once during emergencies where the admins were not reachable, something had to be done right now, and someone with sufficient skill (but who was usually responsible for a different system) was on hand.
The alternative would've been to give all passwords to all admins to memorize, but we all know how well that memorizing part goes for password you use maybe(!) once a year.
There are trials on that, most of them aren't too successful.
The problem is that higher-order pattern recognition is fantastic in humans and sucks in computers. How many pieces of software do you know that I can show a picture and get back a list of items in it? How long would a human take for the task? You're right if your answer was "depends on how fast he can write", because that is the part that takes time, object recognition is almost instantaneous, unless the image is very cluttered.
And it's like that with pretty much everything else. When you boil down the info to something the computer can understand, e.g. giving it a set of pictures and a set of decriptive terms to go with them, your entropy isn't the complexity of the pictures anymore, it's the complexity of the list of terms, i.e. practically nothing.
Dynamic methods suffer from expression and natural language recognition. If I as a human want to know if you are really you, I could ask you about last wednesday at the pub, and your answer would give me a strong indication if you are (or at least know a lot of personal details). A computer would need to comprehend what you say, and natural language recognition isn't all that great, still. Because there are at least 100,000 ways in which you could describe what happened at the pub, leaving out these or those details, using those words or these, etc.
You are also totally fucked if you ever lose the file, or find yourself somewhere without access to it.
And you have just defeated the two-factor part of authentication, congratulations. You are storing your passwords in the same place (your computer) where I can easily find your identity as well. You are supposed to store it somewhere else so an attacker who doesn't try brute-forcing, but goes through your stuff can't find both.
Which is why simply writing it down on a post-it note is perfectly ok for the home environment. Ok, maybe not a post-it note, but a piece of paper in your top desk drawer (so visitors don't immediately see it). But almost all attacks on private persons do not involve physical access to your home simply because it isn't worth it. And if someone breaks into your house and takes everything, your Facebook password is probably the least of your worries, and easily changed. Which, of course, means the one thing you should store somewhere else is the decryption and/or login password for your computer, so the thief don't get it. They'll probably wipe the disk and sell your computer anyways, but if they find the password next to it, they just might look at the sex pictures of you and your spouse just for the fun of it.
Basically: The dirty secret of security is that there are no panaceas. You need to know what the threat scenario is to find a good solution. In your home, where physical access is limited to people you trust anyways, and easy to control, writing passwords down on a piece of paper is preferable to having them stored digitally, because physical access to your home is more effort than digital access to your machine (for most users, maybe not for security-conscious geeks.). In an office environment, where even if you can lock your office, at least two dozen people have the keys, you might want to keep that paper on your person (your wallet) or use something else.
Yes, I do believe the blind hatred on writing passwords down is another of those irrational, counter-productive ideologies of security that doesn't survive a critical analysis. Because too many security freaks aim for theoretical perfection as the comparison case and not the other alternatives.
I gave a speech on this topic recently, and can only support everything said. Most password policies suck so hard, my rough estimates (presented to an academic audience, no refutations so far) show that they lower the complexity of passwords by at least eight orders of magnitude.
That's not a little bit, that is what brings them down into ranges that are brute-forceable.
I think I should translate the paper into english and get it published somewhere.
I've been working fulltime in an elected, political position for about six years, so I kind of know what I'm talking about here:
If you get the chance, do it. This is a real win-win for everyone when it happens. It will help you do things with real meaning and bring about some important changes. I'm modest when I say that my approach to the office revolutionized it and most of the methods I developed are still in use today, four years after I left. That is the "evidence-based" approach TFA talks about, but more. Geeks in general have a less ideological approach to methods and procedures: We tend to have it easier dropping stuff that doesn't work instead of clinging to it "because we've always done it this way". That does get you into political fights sometimes, when you unceremoniously dump the pet method of someone, but it works and that's where you get the credit and trust you need to push more changes through.
And it also benefits you tremendeously. My social skills advanced greatly in this time. Instead of sitting at a computer most day with occasional meetings, my job suddenly was mostly about meeting people.
Negotiations are the greatest thing, ever. A geek with some negotiation training is most opponents worst nightmare. Most of us don't care enough about our own image to be tricked with the various ad hominem dialectics, and we have a great ability to cut through the bullshit and hit the facts of the matter. And since numbers and math are our friends, we aren't easily fooled by bullshit statistics.
And finally, you will almost certainly find that law is not the evil enemy, but just a different type of code. After a few years on the job, I was regularily discussing with full-time lawyers at eye level. A basic understanding of the law - not of any particular law, but the way the law in general works - is a benefit that will pay you back for the rest of your life.
So yes, yes, yes - if you geeks find an opportunity to enter politics, by all means do it. It doesn't have to be a for-life choice. I would've certainly been re-elected for a third term, but decided not to run again because I'd had enough. It isn't always easy, and sometimes all the politics and the people with their pet agendas and all the personal crap gets on your nerves, a lot. I wouldn't want to do it for live, but it was more than worth it doing it for a few years, and I know that both myself and the office profited from it.
"The issues are too complex" is a complete cop-out. All that means is "we can't articulate what we want, you figure it out".
You are ripping the quote out of context. They are too complex to be put into a nice media soundbite. They require discussion and dialog and the solutions won't be one-liners.
Occupy is like a crying baby.
When you pick an unsuitable metaphor, what you do with it only shows how bad your choice was, nothing more.
A crying baby is one entity, Occupy isn't. That is what has politicians et al so confused (and what it shares with Anonymous): There is no central figure, no leader, no point of attack.
But that is also what its strength is. You see, over the past decades, politics has changed a lot. It is now a business and the quarterly target is to stay in power. Politicians have learnt to defang grassroots movements by addressing their main issue in a pseudo-solution way. It's a bit of mental judo - they take the force out of the movement by seemingly taking up the issue and then letting it die in committees, implementation details, long-term plans that constantly change and so on.
Occupy refuses to be reduced to a one-liner and correctly so. The issues that Occupy complains about are complex, and require more than a new law or two, they require fundamental changes to our society and our economic system.
Example: The financial gambling that triggered (but not caused) the financial crisis needs to be addressed. Simply making it illegal doesn't work because it serves a purpose (liquidity), but ignoring it doesn't work either, because it has grown from a useful part of the market to a dominant and destructive force. More than 10 years ago, when I worked at the stock market for a while, we already knew that about 90% of all trading done is pure speculation with no intent of ever interfacing with the real economy. Today, that number is probably 99%. But the exchange was never intended to be a gambling hall, and speculation served the purpose of facilitating trade and providing liquidity.
Basically, the dogs have taken over the sheep farm. You need some of them, but when the whole farm is full of them, you have a problem. You need to curb it back, not wipe it out. How to do that is a non-trivial question and very likely contains many sub-parts.
We've had universal health care... I don't know. At least all my life and most if not all of the lives of my parent generation. Other countries have had it even longer. No collapse anywhere in sight. Heck, many of the social security systems in Europe survived two world wars.
The reason why some of them are collapsing now has a very different cause: The insurance industry has realized that if those social security systems weren't public, but, say, insurances, they would make billions of profits. I'm not exaggerating. The pension system alone is so massive, every insurance manager would get an instant orgasm just thinking about getting a few percentages of it.
So they did what big business does these days: Bribe the government to ruin the systems that stood for a hundred years through wars, economic collapse, everything. They couldn't take it away, because that would've lost them, well, pretty much all voters. But they've run it into the ground intentionally, blaming demographic changes and what else. None of which is true, every few years another economist publishes a paper showing that with but minor changes the public system could be adapted quite easily.
The result is that a) most of us have to take out insurance in addition to the mandatory public pension system and b) we now have something that used to be quite rare in Europe: Old people who are poor despite having worked all their lives.
As for the education - let's just say that aside from the world-famous elite universities, the american school system is the laughing stock of all the first world. One look at it and we are quite certain that we want to stick with ours, despite all its shortcomings.
This should be a reminder that the whole advertisement industry is a parasite, not the symbiot it makes itself out to be. It isn't just funny, but also revealing how the statements of spammers are so very similar to those of marketing people. Like the famous "people are very interested in our newsletter". Yeah, right.
Advertisement is crapping up our public spaces, our public airwaves, everything. Sure, it "pays" for stuff - by turning the consumer into a product to be sold. Would we want to pay for everything instead of getting it free? That's a strawman right there. Because it assumes "all else being equal", which isn't true. Without or with dramatically reduced advertisement, most products would become cheaper. The total amount of money we spend would very likely not change all that much, and since a lot of of advertisement is waste (one saying in marketing is that "we know that half our efforts are completely pointless - but we don't know which half"), it might even go down.
There are a few legitimate uses for advertisement, but they can easily be replaced by something of a more opt-in nature. For example, I skim (rather than read) a few online magazines mostly because I'm interested in new things being available within their respective topic fields. If you want to know which supermarket has special offers this weekend, we have the technology to alert you to the fact, according to your criteria, without having every supermarket within a days drive littering every reachable mailbox with their crap.
There are now a few major cities that have banned all outdoor advertisement (billboard, etc. - some even overly large shop signs) and the results are astonishing and the people actually living there are very, very happy about them. Google it up, there are images of cities like you've not seen them for decades. You know, you can see the buildings again and all.
I'm not very hopeful, but I still think the entire marketing and advertisement industry needs to be cut down to at most 10% its current size. But it won't happen on its own, because all the participants are victims of the system - you can't be the first to stop advertising, because after all, advertisement does work.
This is where we as a society need to take a stand and say "enough!" and put up some rules. You know, the same way we outlawed murder, robbery and fucking babies because we collectively think these are things we don't want to happen.
Stop playing, look at the real world we have markets where ideas can not be protected at all. The fashion industry is the most famous example, but there are quite a few.
Don't play hypothetical what-if when you have examples to guide you.
One Occupy (Wall St.) protester put it very well: "The media wants soundbites, but the issues are too complex for soundbites."
Take some time to become familiar with the movement and you'll realize that while there is no "manifesto", there is a common ground and many of the protesters know what they want. It just can't be summed up in a headline.
And while Anonymous is, well anonymous obviously, the Occupy protesters aren't. They are not Ghandi, but they are like the followers of Ghandi. They don't hide their faces, they are right out there showing them.
Anonymous isn't Occupy. They are two results of the same geo-political and social developments.
Actually, it's not too new a concept on OS X. The Apps you download from the Mac App Store are identical to the software you could download for OS X ever since it got started. That's because OS X has always bundled up applications into one folder, instead of scattering their files all over the place like windows does. That's why uninstalling an application in OS X consists of dragging it into the trashcan.
Basically, when the Mac App Store opened, it was another place to find Mac software, nothing more and nothing less.
Windows and Linux, on the other hand, now face this "new" concept due to the popularity of iPhone and iPad.
If I were Anonymous or a member thereof, I'd be looking for a wealthy socially-conscious sponsor to legitimize what I was doing . . . and take the conversation they are trying to have out in the open, where it can't be dismissed.
But that would be accepting the rules of the game, when what they are doing is challenging them.
Ghandi didn't play by the rules, and neither did Rosa Park. Neither did the Unabomber. Where on the scale inbetween those extremes Anonymous lies I leave to you, but the point is that challenging the rules means breaking those you disagree with.
Corporations are a legal fiction that have no real existence.
You are confusing "real" with "physical". Corporations do not exist as physical entities, but they are very real in the legal sense. And since we're talking about a law in the legal sense, not a law of nature, it is the legal sense that matters.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of those things that serves to reinforce my belief that much of the market is a Ponzi scheme, and that an IPO is a good way to fleece investors as the big guys take their cut and then get out of it.
And it took you this long to realize that?
How many small-time investors do you know that made a bucket of cash on the stock market? Don't say "nobody", I'm sure you know someone if you think about it. I'm not talking filthy-rich, but someone who doubled their investment or something.
See, told you that you'd know someone. Every casino knows it needs the occasional winner so all the other marks think they could be the next one.
Now check how much banks, hedge fonds and other big financial players make at the stock market. Yepp, pretty much all their profits. Even for many banks, unfortunately. Now if you know one thing about the stock market, it should be this: It's a zero-sum game. No money gets ever created or destroyed at the stock exchange, it only changes hands.
So where do the corporations make their money from? Same as any other business: Fools.
No, his crime was evading justice for a decade of con-jobs and borderline psychopathic behaviour. He's not a native New Zealander, did you know that? Do you know why he's no longer in Germany? Might be because everyone in the tech scene here despises him.
Justice hates it when known crooks keep running around because they manage to keep away from the stuff you can prove. Then, when they finally find something to nail you with, they come after you with vengeance. Sure, on paper the legal system works differently - but on paper you can't get away with being a criminal for a decade, either.
The guy is a crook, and everyone here who roots for him is a stupid idiot.
As a matter of fact YES he is innocent in the eyes of the law.
But that wasn't the GPs question. Kim is a sleazy con-man who has fucked over pretty much everyone who has ever been involved with him. He has a dozen reasons for no longer living in his native country (mine), all of which are morally questionable and most are related to illegal activities.
To me, as someone who hasn't learnt that name when Megaupload was busted, this sounds a lot more like Al Capone or justice finally having caught up with him. Yeah, maybe they nail him on tax evasion / copyright infringement, but everyone who knows anything about Kim knows that he deserves everything he's getting and then some.
Imagine my surprise when I loaded up Skype on my iPhone today and noticed that at the top of your contact list, it now displays an ad banner - for Internet Explorer! With an "install now" notice.
Not only did I think someone at MS might be smart enough to realize that I can't install IE on my iPhone, but I thought this is the exact anti-competitive behaviour they had been found guilty for? You know, pushing the crapware IE with their near-monopoly in other areas?
Anyone got a Skype alternative? I knew it was time to dump it when MS acquired it. It was such a nice piece of software. :-(
So yeah, the IE market share is all organic. You know, as organic as plastic wrapped in shrinkwrap foil.
When numbers change, you always need to ask what actually changed. Especially on surveys. Especially on surveys where people self-report.
The "increase" in piracy rate may well be a combination of effects, the most obvious one being an increase in the percentage of people admitting it (i.e. a reduction of the dark figure. It could be a slight decrease of actual piracy, and a large decrease of the dark figure. Or it could be a huge increase in piracy, with a decrease in people reporting it.
So, in summary, it basically tells us very little about piracy.
Not as much as people make it. Demographics has become the scapegoat, just like any economic crisis is always the scapegoat for cuts into the social systems.
There are ways to adapt the pension system to the demographics. But they aren't being explored, because the people in power don't have an interest in saving the pension system.
The main reason is that since TV sucks so badly these days, I don't own one anymore. I have a video beamer shared between my home cinema and Wii, but no cable or other TV reception. And since you can't legally buy the episodes anywhere - there could be a webcomic link here, but by now we all know the one - piratebay it is.
As soon as media companies understand that the Internet is the distribution system they've always dreamed about, they will see the light at the end of the tunnel. The music industry had to be forced to accept that fact, but right now, around 40% of all music sales already happen digitally. A few years from now, they will make more money on the evil Internet than through their old channels. Just like they once fought the VHS tooth and nail and today most movies make more with the DVD version than at the box office.
GP was talking about system/network passwords, not some website.
The e-mail he mentions most likely contains some instructions along the lines of "open up the system preferences, go to ..."
My problem with the xkcd scheme is that users are lazy and rather than pick 4 random words, they'll pick 4 words that are easy to remember in sequence: "haveityourway" "darksideofthemoon" "thesearenothtedroidsyourelookingfor", so with a phrase dictionary and some grammar rules, you still have a good chance at brute-forcing some user's passwords.
Who said the users get to pick the words?
It's trivial to have all or some of the words picked at random.
Really?
Are you saying that out of "gut feeling" (you know, the same thing that tells you the earth is flat), or have you actually clocked yourself typing in "12ol3jkh!!asrdfw9g8" or "^TFGY78UH" and compare it to typing "This chicken tastes like shit!" ?
12ol3jkh!!asrdfw9g8 - 9 seconds
^TFGY78UH - 4.8 seconds
This chicken tastes like shit! - 3.4 seconds
Those are my times. I'm sure they'd come down if I would type this every day as a password. I don't know if they would come down the same, but even the garbage one were to improve twice as fast, the first one will never be faster to type than the last one. Even if it came down three times as fast (unlikely) with practice, it wouldn't, considering real-world restrictions on typing speed.
You are thinking "Internet" and "e-mail", when the more likely scenario for a setup like this is "corporate network" and "Exchange".
Where, among other things, you wouldn't change your password on a website.
many dictionary cracking programs implement mixing of words on the list - meaning "correct horse staple battery" will be cracked in SECONDS, not centuries.
You are wrong. I actually did the math on this for a paper, and the order-of-magnitude in complexity is 10^16 - comparable with what your average password policy provides in theory. The problem being that for the reasons outlined in xkcd, my paper and many other places by now, the actual complexity of most policy-compliant passwords is actually on the order-of-magnitude of 10^7 - while even a worst-case estimate for the xkcd-style password still provides 10^12.
Can't link to the paper because it's only available in print (it's in ISBN 9-783844-806885).
Any password policy that basically forces you to write down your password somewhere is broken
That's ideology, not wisdom.
In fact, there are many real-world cases where the policy itself requires that the password is written down. For example, a company I used to work for had only a small number of admins for each system (a total of about a dozen, usually in pairs for the main systems). The risk that both of them were lost to accidents, sudden leaving or whatever was something the company didn't want to bear, so all the root passwords were written down, sealed in envelopes and put into a safe.
It was a good policy, and it actually saved us more than once during emergencies where the admins were not reachable, something had to be done right now, and someone with sufficient skill (but who was usually responsible for a different system) was on hand.
The alternative would've been to give all passwords to all admins to memorize, but we all know how well that memorizing part goes for password you use maybe(!) once a year.
There are trials on that, most of them aren't too successful.
The problem is that higher-order pattern recognition is fantastic in humans and sucks in computers. How many pieces of software do you know that I can show a picture and get back a list of items in it? How long would a human take for the task? You're right if your answer was "depends on how fast he can write", because that is the part that takes time, object recognition is almost instantaneous, unless the image is very cluttered.
And it's like that with pretty much everything else. When you boil down the info to something the computer can understand, e.g. giving it a set of pictures and a set of decriptive terms to go with them, your entropy isn't the complexity of the pictures anymore, it's the complexity of the list of terms, i.e. practically nothing.
Dynamic methods suffer from expression and natural language recognition. If I as a human want to know if you are really you, I could ask you about last wednesday at the pub, and your answer would give me a strong indication if you are (or at least know a lot of personal details). A computer would need to comprehend what you say, and natural language recognition isn't all that great, still. Because there are at least 100,000 ways in which you could describe what happened at the pub, leaving out these or those details, using those words or these, etc.
You are also totally fucked if you ever lose the file, or find yourself somewhere without access to it.
And you have just defeated the two-factor part of authentication, congratulations. You are storing your passwords in the same place (your computer) where I can easily find your identity as well. You are supposed to store it somewhere else so an attacker who doesn't try brute-forcing, but goes through your stuff can't find both.
Which is why simply writing it down on a post-it note is perfectly ok for the home environment. Ok, maybe not a post-it note, but a piece of paper in your top desk drawer (so visitors don't immediately see it). But almost all attacks on private persons do not involve physical access to your home simply because it isn't worth it. And if someone breaks into your house and takes everything, your Facebook password is probably the least of your worries, and easily changed.
Which, of course, means the one thing you should store somewhere else is the decryption and/or login password for your computer, so the thief don't get it. They'll probably wipe the disk and sell your computer anyways, but if they find the password next to it, they just might look at the sex pictures of you and your spouse just for the fun of it.
Basically: The dirty secret of security is that there are no panaceas. You need to know what the threat scenario is to find a good solution. In your home, where physical access is limited to people you trust anyways, and easy to control, writing passwords down on a piece of paper is preferable to having them stored digitally, because physical access to your home is more effort than digital access to your machine (for most users, maybe not for security-conscious geeks.).
In an office environment, where even if you can lock your office, at least two dozen people have the keys, you might want to keep that paper on your person (your wallet) or use something else.
Yes, I do believe the blind hatred on writing passwords down is another of those irrational, counter-productive ideologies of security that doesn't survive a critical analysis. Because too many security freaks aim for theoretical perfection as the comparison case and not the other alternatives.
I gave a speech on this topic recently, and can only support everything said. Most password policies suck so hard, my rough estimates (presented to an academic audience, no refutations so far) show that they lower the complexity of passwords by at least eight orders of magnitude.
That's not a little bit, that is what brings them down into ranges that are brute-forceable.
I think I should translate the paper into english and get it published somewhere.
I've been working fulltime in an elected, political position for about six years, so I kind of know what I'm talking about here:
If you get the chance, do it. This is a real win-win for everyone when it happens. It will help you do things with real meaning and bring about some important changes. I'm modest when I say that my approach to the office revolutionized it and most of the methods I developed are still in use today, four years after I left. That is the "evidence-based" approach TFA talks about, but more. Geeks in general have a less ideological approach to methods and procedures: We tend to have it easier dropping stuff that doesn't work instead of clinging to it "because we've always done it this way". That does get you into political fights sometimes, when you unceremoniously dump the pet method of someone, but it works and that's where you get the credit and trust you need to push more changes through.
And it also benefits you tremendeously. My social skills advanced greatly in this time. Instead of sitting at a computer most day with occasional meetings, my job suddenly was mostly about meeting people.
Negotiations are the greatest thing, ever. A geek with some negotiation training is most opponents worst nightmare. Most of us don't care enough about our own image to be tricked with the various ad hominem dialectics, and we have a great ability to cut through the bullshit and hit the facts of the matter. And since numbers and math are our friends, we aren't easily fooled by bullshit statistics.
And finally, you will almost certainly find that law is not the evil enemy, but just a different type of code. After a few years on the job, I was regularily discussing with full-time lawyers at eye level. A basic understanding of the law - not of any particular law, but the way the law in general works - is a benefit that will pay you back for the rest of your life.
So yes, yes, yes - if you geeks find an opportunity to enter politics, by all means do it. It doesn't have to be a for-life choice. I would've certainly been re-elected for a third term, but decided not to run again because I'd had enough. It isn't always easy, and sometimes all the politics and the people with their pet agendas and all the personal crap gets on your nerves, a lot. I wouldn't want to do it for live, but it was more than worth it doing it for a few years, and I know that both myself and the office profited from it.
Did I say you should go and do it?
"The issues are too complex" is a complete cop-out. All that means is "we can't articulate what we want, you figure it out".
You are ripping the quote out of context. They are too complex to be put into a nice media soundbite. They require discussion and dialog and the solutions won't be one-liners.
Occupy is like a crying baby.
When you pick an unsuitable metaphor, what you do with it only shows how bad your choice was, nothing more.
A crying baby is one entity, Occupy isn't. That is what has politicians et al so confused (and what it shares with Anonymous): There is no central figure, no leader, no point of attack.
But that is also what its strength is. You see, over the past decades, politics has changed a lot. It is now a business and the quarterly target is to stay in power. Politicians have learnt to defang grassroots movements by addressing their main issue in a pseudo-solution way. It's a bit of mental judo - they take the force out of the movement by seemingly taking up the issue and then letting it die in committees, implementation details, long-term plans that constantly change and so on.
Occupy refuses to be reduced to a one-liner and correctly so. The issues that Occupy complains about are complex, and require more than a new law or two, they require fundamental changes to our society and our economic system.
Example: The financial gambling that triggered (but not caused) the financial crisis needs to be addressed. Simply making it illegal doesn't work because it serves a purpose (liquidity), but ignoring it doesn't work either, because it has grown from a useful part of the market to a dominant and destructive force. More than 10 years ago, when I worked at the stock market for a while, we already knew that about 90% of all trading done is pure speculation with no intent of ever interfacing with the real economy. Today, that number is probably 99%. But the exchange was never intended to be a gambling hall, and speculation served the purpose of facilitating trade and providing liquidity.
Basically, the dogs have taken over the sheep farm. You need some of them, but when the whole farm is full of them, you have a problem. You need to curb it back, not wipe it out. How to do that is a non-trivial question and very likely contains many sub-parts.
Sorry, buddy, but you missed the train there.
We've had universal health care... I don't know. At least all my life and most if not all of the lives of my parent generation. Other countries have had it even longer. No collapse anywhere in sight. Heck, many of the social security systems in Europe survived two world wars.
The reason why some of them are collapsing now has a very different cause: The insurance industry has realized that if those social security systems weren't public, but, say, insurances, they would make billions of profits. I'm not exaggerating. The pension system alone is so massive, every insurance manager would get an instant orgasm just thinking about getting a few percentages of it.
So they did what big business does these days: Bribe the government to ruin the systems that stood for a hundred years through wars, economic collapse, everything. They couldn't take it away, because that would've lost them, well, pretty much all voters. But they've run it into the ground intentionally, blaming demographic changes and what else. None of which is true, every few years another economist publishes a paper showing that with but minor changes the public system could be adapted quite easily.
The result is that a) most of us have to take out insurance in addition to the mandatory public pension system and b) we now have something that used to be quite rare in Europe: Old people who are poor despite having worked all their lives.
As for the education - let's just say that aside from the world-famous elite universities, the american school system is the laughing stock of all the first world. One look at it and we are quite certain that we want to stick with ours, despite all its shortcomings.
This should be a reminder that the whole advertisement industry is a parasite, not the symbiot it makes itself out to be. It isn't just funny, but also revealing how the statements of spammers are so very similar to those of marketing people. Like the famous "people are very interested in our newsletter". Yeah, right.
Advertisement is crapping up our public spaces, our public airwaves, everything. Sure, it "pays" for stuff - by turning the consumer into a product to be sold. Would we want to pay for everything instead of getting it free? That's a strawman right there. Because it assumes "all else being equal", which isn't true. Without or with dramatically reduced advertisement, most products would become cheaper. The total amount of money we spend would very likely not change all that much, and since a lot of of advertisement is waste (one saying in marketing is that "we know that half our efforts are completely pointless - but we don't know which half"), it might even go down.
There are a few legitimate uses for advertisement, but they can easily be replaced by something of a more opt-in nature. For example, I skim (rather than read) a few online magazines mostly because I'm interested in new things being available within their respective topic fields. If you want to know which supermarket has special offers this weekend, we have the technology to alert you to the fact, according to your criteria, without having every supermarket within a days drive littering every reachable mailbox with their crap.
There are now a few major cities that have banned all outdoor advertisement (billboard, etc. - some even overly large shop signs) and the results are astonishing and the people actually living there are very, very happy about them. Google it up, there are images of cities like you've not seen them for decades. You know, you can see the buildings again and all.
I'm not very hopeful, but I still think the entire marketing and advertisement industry needs to be cut down to at most 10% its current size. But it won't happen on its own, because all the participants are victims of the system - you can't be the first to stop advertising, because after all, advertisement does work.
This is where we as a society need to take a stand and say "enough!" and put up some rules. You know, the same way we outlawed murder, robbery and fucking babies because we collectively think these are things we don't want to happen.
Stop playing, look at the real world we have markets where ideas can not be protected at all. The fashion industry is the most famous example, but there are quite a few.
Don't play hypothetical what-if when you have examples to guide you.
I disagree.
One Occupy (Wall St.) protester put it very well: "The media wants soundbites, but the issues are too complex for soundbites."
Take some time to become familiar with the movement and you'll realize that while there is no "manifesto", there is a common ground and many of the protesters know what they want. It just can't be summed up in a headline.
And while Anonymous is, well anonymous obviously, the Occupy protesters aren't. They are not Ghandi, but they are like the followers of Ghandi. They don't hide their faces, they are right out there showing them.
Anonymous isn't Occupy. They are two results of the same geo-political and social developments.
Actually, it's not too new a concept on OS X. The Apps you download from the Mac App Store are identical to the software you could download for OS X ever since it got started. That's because OS X has always bundled up applications into one folder, instead of scattering their files all over the place like windows does. That's why uninstalling an application in OS X consists of dragging it into the trashcan.
Basically, when the Mac App Store opened, it was another place to find Mac software, nothing more and nothing less.
Windows and Linux, on the other hand, now face this "new" concept due to the popularity of iPhone and iPad.
If I were Anonymous or a member thereof, I'd be looking for a wealthy socially-conscious sponsor to legitimize what I was doing . . . and take the conversation they are trying to have out in the open, where it can't be dismissed.
But that would be accepting the rules of the game, when what they are doing is challenging them.
Ghandi didn't play by the rules, and neither did Rosa Park. Neither did the Unabomber. Where on the scale inbetween those extremes Anonymous lies I leave to you, but the point is that challenging the rules means breaking those you disagree with.
Corporations are a legal fiction that have no real existence.
You are confusing "real" with "physical". Corporations do not exist as physical entities, but they are very real in the legal sense. And since we're talking about a law in the legal sense, not a law of nature, it is the legal sense that matters.