It's a good first step to curb some of the abuse and limit the gambling, but we know that it won't work very well. People know the odds of winning the lottery, and yet they play. Because humans are incredibly bad at judging chances and probabilities.
As a (used) Leaf owner, I can confirm that I own the whole damn car - including the battery
Interesting. So that is a country thing (I'm currently living in Austria). The Nissan dealer made it sound like that is general policy. I asked about this point specifically, because it surprised me.
People who buy a Model S are not looking to save money. The car is about a 100K if you take a reasonable package. When you can dump 100K on a car, you're not counting how many cents you save per kilometer.
Several companies make more electric cars than Tesla does. Nissan is one you've heard of, probably. The Nissan Leaf is the most popular. They also make some all-electric vehicles for business use.
I was looking for a new car this year, and I very much wanted an electric car. So I checked all of the ones available in this country, including the Leaf, the Ionic, a bunch of hybrids and a couple others I forgot. Also a Tesla.
The Leaf or Ionic are the ones I remember clearly, so I'll write about them and ignore the forgettable ones. They are cute cars. The Ionic especially surprised me in a positive way. Very nice car. But they are not in the same class as the Tesla. Their range is laughable and the way they market them even more so (for example, on the Leaf you have to rent the battery - it isn't included in the car price and you can not buy it for any money). They have some way to go before they are serious cars. I might have considered an Ionic as a secondary car for everyday short drives, but I needed a primary car that is suitable for longer trips as well.
While Tesla is certainly strong on the hype front, their cars are considerably closer to being real cars than the competing electronic cars on the market today.
The BRICS countries have just as much control over it as their Western counterparts.
On paper, yes. If I were a country that is under active, ongoing attack by US propaganda, I would think twice about how much that paper is actually worth as well.
It's relatively cheap to set up a couple root DNS servers, and in case some shit hits the fan, it will really, really help you a lot. So the cost-benefit ratio is quite good and it's a move that probably comes out as recommended if you run the risk analysis.
You think any UN treaty would stop the US military? The only effect would be that the research is done secretly. You simply cannot afford to not have these things, at least on paper, when the enemy potentially does.
What does it take until people wake up and get rid of this silly "everything the government does is evil, everything corporations do can be fixed by the free market" meme?
These companies employ armies of psychologists and statisticians to find the best ways to exploit their players. They are hardly in the games business at all anymore. This is not a fair fight, it is not something that players by themselves can fix.
Some of us have been ranting about exploitative microtransactions for years - but it is becoming worse and worse. That by itself should be proof enough that outside intervention is needed.
Should you take to social media and cause as much brand damage as possible?
Actual research shows that brand damage is very short-lived in most cases. Even the massive data breaches like suffered by Target drove down their sales and stock prices for a whooping three days. The effect of reputation damage, whether by security issues or shitstorms, is vastly overrated.
Can we get the same feature for other propaganda as well? Chinese propaganda, american propaganda, and most importantly: Corporate propaganda.
According to WP:
Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented.
That describes just about any advertisement or political statement made by any politician during the past decade.
We are being manipulated constantly, from all sides. My profession is information security, so I have a lot of exposure to "evil russians". Here's a consistent pattern that I've noticed again and again and again, and I'm beginning to believe that it applies to the russian infowar approach as well: Russian methods are more obvious, more transparent. Might be less experience or a reduced sensitivity to exposure (Russians distrust their government even more than americans do, and basically assume that all politicians are corrupt anyways, so there's less need to pretend). But once you look past that, there's really not so much difference. Western manipulations, or security attacks, are less obvious, more tricky, spend more resources on appearing as something else or remaining unnoticed. There is also a lot more misdirection in the western approach. But when you look at plain data, the USA is as much an attack source as Russia, if not more so (this recent article lists the USA far ahead of Russia, with Turkey and Brazil ahead of the evil ex-communists).
We are clearly seing a revival of Cold War animosities. Maybe trecking out NK and Iran as the "Axis of Evil" doesn't have the desired effect anymore? Maybe a large event (not necessarily a war, but could be) is being prepared and the public opinion needs to be set up properly first? Or maybe the people in charge are just boneheaded idiots who seriously think that Russia is a big danger, but climate change is a fabrication. No, you cannot possibly be that stupid, you would forget to breathe if you had that much of a brain damage.
But "fake news" isn't news at all, it's been around for hundreds of years. As has been propaganda, and the main source of propaganda, at all times in history, has always been - surprise - your own government. Which is logical, of course. The local/national government has the most to lose or win from your opinion, so they have the greatest interest in influencing it.
So please give us fake news background checks not just for selected sources. The person that writes a Firefox extension that automatically overlays advertisement with fact-checking background information deserves a Nobel prize. The person who hacks the cable broadcast infrastructure to put that on all the TV stations - we'd have to invent a new prize for that person. The manipulations that were done in the name of profit begin to make those done in the name of war appear harmless. Sugar industry, tobacco industry, oil industry - these fuckers are ready to destroy generations of people so their next quarterly earnings reports are good. With such friends, who needs enemies? I personally am much more worried about these guys.
You cannot create a proof for everything, and for reasonably complicated algorithms, the proof may be too complex to create. That is true for most cryptography.
But there are quite a few things that we could create formal proofs for, if we wanted to. You don't have to believe me. You can go to the search engine of your choice and find a few actual formal proofs.
The primary reason is that software quality is down the drain. We actually know how to write software two orders of magnitude better than what we have now (the metric being bug count). There'sa single-digit number of companies in the world doing it. They are successful, and the business case is ok (less maintenance cost and issue-related costs down the road), but only if you look at it long-term and with a dominance of short-term thinking, well, we have the mess we have today. Startup culture especially is the enemy of software quality, because within 2 years you must be big or bust. That prevents investments in long-term quality and time-to-market is also critical, pressing on the timeframe.
The second reason is that we have abandoned academic (i.e. provable) software design. Again, there are a few exceptions, P3KI for example has a formal proof (disclaimer: I know the guys behind it) as do a small number of other projects. But most "security practices" are basically made-up. Maybe they are good, maybe not, you don't know because they're based on intuition, not proof or facts. A guy named Bell a couple years ago rightfully lamented this fact, and he has very high credentials (google "Bell-LaPadula model").
The third reason is that bad guys are lazy, incompetent and/or busy. It is incredibly easy to break into most systems, but most of the bad guys these days are in it for the money. That means they look for ROI as well, which means they attack only the weakest targets. That is why most of the stuff we see on the malware side, or on the hacker side, is not exactly rocket science. In 15 years of career in the field, I found a true zero day on a compromised machine once. And that in turn means that from a protection perspective, you can be quite secure with a more or less minimal level of security. Because as soon as you are not the weakest target anymore, 99% of attacks will bypass you and hit someone else. There is no incentive to really improve security baselines, because it doesn't pay out.
It's a shame, really. We made jokes about the quality of windows in the 90s. Now the joke is on us.
Yeah I did, and the main question I have: How can I set the interface back to look the way it used to?
I'm tired of stupid UI designers thinking they need to make their mark by fucking with established interfaces. Unless you have a revolutionary new thing - which you can offer as an option - don't fucking fuck with it. How difficult is it to put your ego behind general usability and familiarity?
The idea "only experts" is bad as well. You need a proper mix. If you have a simple question about, say, quantum chromodynamics, you can spend a week doing research and then write down something that may or may not be true. Or you can ask one expert, he will give you an answer, and then you ask him or find the references to support that answer.
If I'm the editor of a WP page about some local castle, I probably don't need an expert, its history and significance is easy to find and just needs to be summed up. If I write about actually difficult topics, well, good luck even understanding the articles that you find.
You assume they don't already understand, and aren't just asking for the absurd using emotional rhetoric and a phoney appeal to meatspace in order to make a power grab.
Yes, I do. Because most people are actually good people. Except smokers and the religious, they're just pure evil and the world will be a better place without them.
The firings is usually the only "synergies" that are actually realised.
Until you find out a year later that you needed half of those people, and hire them back. Well, not the same people, of course, they have other jobs now. You hire different people, then spend a lot of money training them, burning all those savings (but they were on a different quarterly report, so that's all good).
With no exception, all the mergers I've seen close all had this firing phase, and then about a year later, a hiring phase.
No matter what you say folks, it's interesting to hear how the world looks from another perspective.
And I can understand the guy. Yes we want strong encryption (it helps us) but we need backdoors (it sometimes stops us as well).
This is not so unusual. The policy have operated like this for decades, if not centuries. We all want secure phone lines and taping them should be a crime, but the police needs a way to tap them when they're trying to save your daughter from the guy who asks for money or else...
Just that encryption doesn't work that way. Phone lines are still physical items. Encryption algorithms are not. The second your backdoor gets leaked to China, we are all completely fucked.
We need more dialog with these people instead of just calling them idiots. We need to understand their needs, and explain them why the old ways don't work in this case.
They actually don't, which is why you find extensive articles on geography, cities and stars, movies and a hundred other topics that are easy to understand and easily found in a Google search. But when you get into difficult subjects, a large number of articles are basically extended stubs that look like someone edited together a summary of the first 10 hits of a Google search. No in-depth information, less than five links to other sources, half of which are newspapers or magazines who published one article about this subject ten years ago.
Whenever I am researching something that's tricky or technical, I don't even bother with the WP article. The exception is if I need to write a very simple high-level summary for lay people (executives and managers). In that area there's a 50% chance that the WP article will be useful.
Yes, the main premise of WP is false. More importantly, many of its articles are incomplete or factually false, especially whenever they enter territory where it needs a subject matter expert to write a correct description. But according to official WP policy, a factually false entry with easy-to-understand third-party sources (which can all point back to the same one long since falsified study) will take precedence over a properly sourced references that are more difficult to understand or judge.
There were a couple other WP-like projects a decade ago, which had a concept of "experts" where you would send in your credentials and only then get proper editing privileges on specific topics or areas. Their quality was considerably higher, but their quantity was so much lower that they lost out and disappeared.
I used to spend quite a bit of time on Wikipedia, editing and adding articles in fields I am an expert in. But the constant reverting, and deletion requests finally tired me out. If you have a life outside of WP, you just can't persist in its atmosphere.
So are Russians now incredibly competent and advanced, or are they backwater vodka-drinkers? Make your pick, but it's only one of those. Either those Russians are very competent and can break into stuff where other people can't, or they're a 3rd world country that plays big under an evil dictator. But those things don't mix. We just see the narrative changed all the time, depending on what the purpose is.
All mergers are accompanied with glorified accounts of how much synergy will be realized. I've been through several mergers, the last two at high management positions. In reality, only a small part of that synergy is ever realized, because the consultants never dig deep enough to figure out that no, you will not be able to merge your CMS systems because A doesn't offer this critically important feature that B offers. So you also can't save half of the IT personal, or maintenance cost. And no, that one call center can't handle all your requests without extensive training and tool changes. And no, those three managers are not superfluous they actually have all the really important information in their heads. And so on and so forth.
In a good merger, a fraction of the projected savings is actually realised. In a typical merger, next to nothing. The main purpose is to consolidate market share and get rid of a competitor.
The modern elites are not nation-bound anymore. They live on yachts in international waters, fly around the world in private planes (or state-owned ones) and have their money in several different tax heavens and jurisdictions so that no amount of sanctions or other problems can shut them down.
If you honestly think any of them care about your country or my country or whatever todays "axis of evil" is, you are a complete idiot. The only thing they care about is money and power, which is why they have it. If you focus your entire life around the question of "how do I get more money?" then you have a much higher chance of making it than us normal people who are burdened with ethics, friends (real friends, not just useful contacts) and a soul or whatever you want to call that piece of humanity inside of you.
We have a brilliant example in my home country, which has been ruled for over a decade now by a person whose only demonstrated skill is how to get and keep power.
Really, all of this is so clear to anyone with three working brain cells, as they're not even trying to hide anything anymore. The only question we all should be asking ourselves is how to shut down this global robbery.
If you need any evidence that the justice system is fundamentally broken, look no further.
If you can keep your enemy in court for the time that it takes the kid you fathered on the first night of the case to grow up, something is seriously wrong with the concept of "justice" that such a system delivers.
Any and all consequences from the ruling except monetary are long done with.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a good first step to curb some of the abuse and limit the gambling, but we know that it won't work very well. People know the odds of winning the lottery, and yet they play. Because humans are incredibly bad at judging chances and probabilities.
You have never met a German, have you?
I actually am a German. Not sure on whom the joke is with that.
As a (used) Leaf owner, I can confirm that I own the whole damn car - including the battery
Interesting. So that is a country thing (I'm currently living in Austria). The Nissan dealer made it sound like that is general policy. I asked about this point specifically, because it surprised me.
People who buy a Model S are not looking to save money. The car is about a 100K if you take a reasonable package. When you can dump 100K on a car, you're not counting how many cents you save per kilometer.
Several companies make more electric cars than Tesla does. Nissan is one you've heard of, probably. The Nissan Leaf is the most popular. They also make some all-electric vehicles for business use.
I was looking for a new car this year, and I very much wanted an electric car. So I checked all of the ones available in this country, including the Leaf, the Ionic, a bunch of hybrids and a couple others I forgot. Also a Tesla.
The Leaf or Ionic are the ones I remember clearly, so I'll write about them and ignore the forgettable ones. They are cute cars. The Ionic especially surprised me in a positive way. Very nice car. But they are not in the same class as the Tesla. Their range is laughable and the way they market them even more so (for example, on the Leaf you have to rent the battery - it isn't included in the car price and you can not buy it for any money). They have some way to go before they are serious cars. I might have considered an Ionic as a secondary car for everyday short drives, but I needed a primary car that is suitable for longer trips as well.
While Tesla is certainly strong on the hype front, their cars are considerably closer to being real cars than the competing electronic cars on the market today.
The BRICS countries have just as much control over it as their Western counterparts.
On paper, yes. If I were a country that is under active, ongoing attack by US propaganda, I would think twice about how much that paper is actually worth as well.
It's relatively cheap to set up a couple root DNS servers, and in case some shit hits the fan, it will really, really help you a lot. So the cost-benefit ratio is quite good and it's a move that probably comes out as recommended if you run the risk analysis.
At least they say it openly.
You think any UN treaty would stop the US military? The only effect would be that the research is done secretly. You simply cannot afford to not have these things, at least on paper, when the enemy potentially does.
What does it take until people wake up and get rid of this silly "everything the government does is evil, everything corporations do can be fixed by the free market" meme?
These companies employ armies of psychologists and statisticians to find the best ways to exploit their players. They are hardly in the games business at all anymore. This is not a fair fight, it is not something that players by themselves can fix.
Some of us have been ranting about exploitative microtransactions for years - but it is becoming worse and worse. That by itself should be proof enough that outside intervention is needed.
Should you take to social media and cause as much brand damage as possible?
Actual research shows that brand damage is very short-lived in most cases. Even the massive data breaches like suffered by Target drove down their sales and stock prices for a whooping three days. The effect of reputation damage, whether by security issues or shitstorms, is vastly overrated.
Can we get the same feature for other propaganda as well? Chinese propaganda, american propaganda, and most importantly: Corporate propaganda.
According to WP:
Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented.
That describes just about any advertisement or political statement made by any politician during the past decade.
We are being manipulated constantly, from all sides. My profession is information security, so I have a lot of exposure to "evil russians". Here's a consistent pattern that I've noticed again and again and again, and I'm beginning to believe that it applies to the russian infowar approach as well: Russian methods are more obvious, more transparent. Might be less experience or a reduced sensitivity to exposure (Russians distrust their government even more than americans do, and basically assume that all politicians are corrupt anyways, so there's less need to pretend). But once you look past that, there's really not so much difference. Western manipulations, or security attacks, are less obvious, more tricky, spend more resources on appearing as something else or remaining unnoticed. There is also a lot more misdirection in the western approach. But when you look at plain data, the USA is as much an attack source as Russia, if not more so (this recent article lists the USA far ahead of Russia, with Turkey and Brazil ahead of the evil ex-communists).
We are clearly seing a revival of Cold War animosities. Maybe trecking out NK and Iran as the "Axis of Evil" doesn't have the desired effect anymore? Maybe a large event (not necessarily a war, but could be) is being prepared and the public opinion needs to be set up properly first? Or maybe the people in charge are just boneheaded idiots who seriously think that Russia is a big danger, but climate change is a fabrication. No, you cannot possibly be that stupid, you would forget to breathe if you had that much of a brain damage.
But "fake news" isn't news at all, it's been around for hundreds of years. As has been propaganda, and the main source of propaganda, at all times in history, has always been - surprise - your own government. Which is logical, of course. The local/national government has the most to lose or win from your opinion, so they have the greatest interest in influencing it.
So please give us fake news background checks not just for selected sources. The person that writes a Firefox extension that automatically overlays advertisement with fact-checking background information deserves a Nobel prize. The person who hacks the cable broadcast infrastructure to put that on all the TV stations - we'd have to invent a new prize for that person. The manipulations that were done in the name of profit begin to make those done in the name of war appear harmless. Sugar industry, tobacco industry, oil industry - these fuckers are ready to destroy generations of people so their next quarterly earnings reports are good. With such friends, who needs enemies? I personally am much more worried about these guys.
Yes, you can. Formal proofs are a real thing.
You cannot create a proof for everything, and for reasonably complicated algorithms, the proof may be too complex to create. That is true for most cryptography.
But there are quite a few things that we could create formal proofs for, if we wanted to. You don't have to believe me. You can go to the search engine of your choice and find a few actual formal proofs.
The primary reason is that software quality is down the drain. We actually know how to write software two orders of magnitude better than what we have now (the metric being bug count). There'sa single-digit number of companies in the world doing it. They are successful, and the business case is ok (less maintenance cost and issue-related costs down the road), but only if you look at it long-term and with a dominance of short-term thinking, well, we have the mess we have today. Startup culture especially is the enemy of software quality, because within 2 years you must be big or bust. That prevents investments in long-term quality and time-to-market is also critical, pressing on the timeframe.
The second reason is that we have abandoned academic (i.e. provable) software design. Again, there are a few exceptions, P3KI for example has a formal proof (disclaimer: I know the guys behind it) as do a small number of other projects. But most "security practices" are basically made-up. Maybe they are good, maybe not, you don't know because they're based on intuition, not proof or facts. A guy named Bell a couple years ago rightfully lamented this fact, and he has very high credentials (google "Bell-LaPadula model").
The third reason is that bad guys are lazy, incompetent and/or busy. It is incredibly easy to break into most systems, but most of the bad guys these days are in it for the money. That means they look for ROI as well, which means they attack only the weakest targets. That is why most of the stuff we see on the malware side, or on the hacker side, is not exactly rocket science. In 15 years of career in the field, I found a true zero day on a compromised machine once. And that in turn means that from a protection perspective, you can be quite secure with a more or less minimal level of security. Because as soon as you are not the weakest target anymore, 99% of attacks will bypass you and hit someone else. There is no incentive to really improve security baselines, because it doesn't pay out.
It's a shame, really. We made jokes about the quality of windows in the 90s. Now the joke is on us.
Yeah I did, and the main question I have: How can I set the interface back to look the way it used to?
I'm tired of stupid UI designers thinking they need to make their mark by fucking with established interfaces. Unless you have a revolutionary new thing - which you can offer as an option - don't fucking fuck with it. How difficult is it to put your ego behind general usability and familiarity?
You have to be a special kind of asshole to consider paying taxes in the places where you make your money an "undue risk".
No, the idea is not sound.
The idea "only experts" is bad as well. You need a proper mix. If you have a simple question about, say, quantum chromodynamics, you can spend a week doing research and then write down something that may or may not be true. Or you can ask one expert, he will give you an answer, and then you ask him or find the references to support that answer.
If I'm the editor of a WP page about some local castle, I probably don't need an expert, its history and significance is easy to find and just needs to be summed up. If I write about actually difficult topics, well, good luck even understanding the articles that you find.
You assume they don't already understand, and aren't just asking for the absurd using emotional rhetoric and a phoney appeal to meatspace in order to make a power grab.
Yes, I do. Because most people are actually good people. Except smokers and the religious, they're just pure evil and the world will be a better place without them.
The firings is usually the only "synergies" that are actually realised.
Until you find out a year later that you needed half of those people, and hire them back. Well, not the same people, of course, they have other jobs now. You hire different people, then spend a lot of money training them, burning all those savings (but they were on a different quarterly report, so that's all good).
With no exception, all the mergers I've seen close all had this firing phase, and then about a year later, a hiring phase.
No matter what you say folks, it's interesting to hear how the world looks from another perspective.
And I can understand the guy. Yes we want strong encryption (it helps us) but we need backdoors (it sometimes stops us as well).
This is not so unusual. The policy have operated like this for decades, if not centuries. We all want secure phone lines and taping them should be a crime, but the police needs a way to tap them when they're trying to save your daughter from the guy who asks for money or else...
Just that encryption doesn't work that way. Phone lines are still physical items. Encryption algorithms are not. The second your backdoor gets leaked to China, we are all completely fucked.
We need more dialog with these people instead of just calling them idiots. We need to understand their needs, and explain them why the old ways don't work in this case.
I literally just wrote the exact same comment, in different words. Seems to be a common experience.
They actually don't, which is why you find extensive articles on geography, cities and stars, movies and a hundred other topics that are easy to understand and easily found in a Google search. But when you get into difficult subjects, a large number of articles are basically extended stubs that look like someone edited together a summary of the first 10 hits of a Google search. No in-depth information, less than five links to other sources, half of which are newspapers or magazines who published one article about this subject ten years ago.
Whenever I am researching something that's tricky or technical, I don't even bother with the WP article. The exception is if I need to write a very simple high-level summary for lay people (executives and managers). In that area there's a 50% chance that the WP article will be useful.
Yes, the main premise of WP is false. More importantly, many of its articles are incomplete or factually false, especially whenever they enter territory where it needs a subject matter expert to write a correct description. But according to official WP policy, a factually false entry with easy-to-understand third-party sources (which can all point back to the same one long since falsified study) will take precedence over a properly sourced references that are more difficult to understand or judge.
There were a couple other WP-like projects a decade ago, which had a concept of "experts" where you would send in your credentials and only then get proper editing privileges on specific topics or areas. Their quality was considerably higher, but their quantity was so much lower that they lost out and disappeared.
This.
I used to spend quite a bit of time on Wikipedia, editing and adding articles in fields I am an expert in. But the constant reverting, and deletion requests finally tired me out. If you have a life outside of WP, you just can't persist in its atmosphere.
So are Russians now incredibly competent and advanced, or are they backwater vodka-drinkers? Make your pick, but it's only one of those. Either those Russians are very competent and can break into stuff where other people can't, or they're a 3rd world country that plays big under an evil dictator. But those things don't mix. We just see the narrative changed all the time, depending on what the purpose is.
The key word being "expected" to save.
All mergers are accompanied with glorified accounts of how much synergy will be realized. I've been through several mergers, the last two at high management positions. In reality, only a small part of that synergy is ever realized, because the consultants never dig deep enough to figure out that no, you will not be able to merge your CMS systems because A doesn't offer this critically important feature that B offers. So you also can't save half of the IT personal, or maintenance cost. And no, that one call center can't handle all your requests without extensive training and tool changes. And no, those three managers are not superfluous they actually have all the really important information in their heads. And so on and so forth.
In a good merger, a fraction of the projected savings is actually realised. In a typical merger, next to nothing. The main purpose is to consolidate market share and get rid of a competitor.
Here's the thing that most people don't get:
The modern elites are not nation-bound anymore. They live on yachts in international waters, fly around the world in private planes (or state-owned ones) and have their money in several different tax heavens and jurisdictions so that no amount of sanctions or other problems can shut them down.
If you honestly think any of them care about your country or my country or whatever todays "axis of evil" is, you are a complete idiot. The only thing they care about is money and power, which is why they have it. If you focus your entire life around the question of "how do I get more money?" then you have a much higher chance of making it than us normal people who are burdened with ethics, friends (real friends, not just useful contacts) and a soul or whatever you want to call that piece of humanity inside of you.
We have a brilliant example in my home country, which has been ruled for over a decade now by a person whose only demonstrated skill is how to get and keep power.
Really, all of this is so clear to anyone with three working brain cells, as they're not even trying to hide anything anymore. The only question we all should be asking ourselves is how to shut down this global robbery.
If you need any evidence that the justice system is fundamentally broken, look no further.
If you can keep your enemy in court for the time that it takes the kid you fathered on the first night of the case to grow up, something is seriously wrong with the concept of "justice" that such a system delivers.
Any and all consequences from the ruling except monetary are long done with.