Whoever came up with this should be shot. Seriously. Either use the DNS the way it is designed, or open it up and let everyone make stuff up.
yahoo.mobi? Idiots who fell for a salesguy with even less brains, and neither of them understand what a hierarchy is supposed to be for.
mobi.yahoo.com - now, was that so difficult? Google gets it - it's "maps.google.com" and not "google.maps". And that's exactly the way the DNS hierarchy is supposed to work - go from the most general towards the more specific. TLD: Generic type, domain name: Owner/Company, subdomain: Purpose.
Ah well, I guess it's too late anyways. Idiots have been running ICANN for years, it was only a matter of time until they fuck up completely. I'm sure this'll go through.:(((
Unfortunately you're confusing freedom with privacy.
I don't think I do.
Freedom is my ability to do what I want to do (within the limits of bla bla, you get the drift) Privacy is my ability to control information about myself.
If I want to have a nice evening with my secretary, the ability to do so is freedom. The ability to keep it between the two of us is privacy. Your camera example also drives that home.
There is, however, a relation between freedom and privacy that you overlook. Privacy is often a requirement for freedom. It isn't for no reason that when a government goes about hunting the freedom birds, that it goes after privacy very early in the game.
In pure theory, you could have freedom, but no privacy. If everything were taped, but nothing bad ever happens because of that. In the real world, there are leaks, and there are misunderstandinds and there are sadistic assholes in the police and government. But you can't have privacy and no freedom. Any government that eliminates freedom (i.e. a totalitarian police state) can not let you have privacy. You could plot to overthrow it, or just break some law, and they can't have you do that.
That's why defending privacy is defending freedom. Privacy is one of the first casualties when freedom is attacked. Look at any totalitarian state. How many of them have solid privacy laws (and not just on paper) ?
If some Johnny in Madison Wisconsin finds out a guy named Gray Calx wears women's underwear... does it matter?
To Gray it probably does. A lot. And that's the difference between freedom and privacy - freedom must be defined by a community because my freedom and your freedom might collide, and then we need to have rules as to which is more important. Privacy is no such beast. My privacy and your privacy don't collide, ever. Each of us can define for himself which things he wants to keep private and confidential.
So you can't judge what is and isn't spam on a global level like that.
I totally can, exactly because of the global level. Here's why:
* I live in Germany. Do you think those US mortgage spams would make a deal with me even if I were interested? * I don't read russian. Whatever those russian spammers are trying to sell, it isn't for me. * I have a bittorrent client. What do I need porn spam for?:)
Your old man signed up. That's fine. That's exactly what spam is not. Remember, spam is unsolicited mass-mailings, and almost always to random addresses (i.e. just any and all you can get your dirty hands on).
why would people with nothing to hide want to encrypt their conversations.
Because the dudes at NSA can google for porn if they need some instead of listening in on me and my girl.
Everyone has something to hide. For 99.999% of us it isn't bomb plans or drug deals, but what you did to your secretary yesterday or even just that embarassing personal secret from your teenager days.
One of the very core principles of privacy is that I get to decide what I consider private, not you or the government. Your interest in dressing in women's underwear isn't a state secret, but it might well be that to you it is absolutely important that nobody knows about it.
I think your characterization of the situation is rather short sighted and optimistic. The ultimate goal of Islamic fundamentalism is to dismantle secular institutions and set up an Islamic state.
Ehem... you do realize that Saddam's Iraq was a secular as things get in the near east? And that the new Iraqi government has the Sharia written into its constitution (as in "no law shall violate the Sharia")?
If this were their motivation, they'd be kissing Bushies feet.
Even for Osama, this is only part of his motivation. He's made it abundantly clear in several of his speeches that one of his prime goals is to get the unbelievers out of Saudi Arabia, where Islam's most holy places are located.
I think our success can only be measured by our ability to give Iraq the ability to defend themselves and our ability to make Iraq free.
Then your success so far is exactly zero. Iraq is a more free today, but most of that is on paper and not in real, daily life. Their ability to defend themselves is, well I'd guess there aren't many countries in the world that could not successfully invade Iraq if they had only their own army to defend themselves.
To that end, Iraq has had free elections, we've incorporated the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites into the government and we training of their military is ongoing.
Much of the training is to rebuild something they had 5 years ago. Like a police force. It's not progress, it's a desperate attempt to return to normality.
The free elections, yes. But the "incorporation" isn't going very well, is it? Saddam had kept the nationalities more or less seperated and used them against each other, but at least it was a stable relationship without much bloodshed. Not exactly what we have today, is it?
What progress can insurgents really say they have made since the start of the war?
Wrong scale. At the start of the war, there were no insurgents, so you can't measure their progress from there. You have to measure from the end of the war, when the insurgents first appeared.
And they've made a lot of progress since then. Currently, for example, Basra is falling into their hands, the Brits already admit they don't control the city any longer. And let's not even talk about Baghdad...
And now imagine if they would team up with MS and Vista scans all mails the user sends (it probably does that anyways) and if he is dumb enough to reply to any of those "enlarge your penis" scams, it disconnects the network, permanently.
It'd be 3 days until spam is a thing of the past.
I mean, we've been talking about removing the profit for a long time. Has nobody before me thought about doing it by removing the dumb who are the profit source?
Because these "spam kings" (ok, let's find a new, more acceptable phrase, like "spam dorks") tend to hide out in countries that either have a) no formalized relations with the US or other countries or b) countries that might be allies but will not let us simply go tromping through their country on the hunt for spammers.
Wrong. Of the top 200 spammers, the vast majority is still located in the USofA.
They aren't hiding in the least. We know who they are. But Bush & Co. don't get enough spam, apparently. Otherwise there's be a tank in Alan Ralsky's garden and attack helicopters over Tony Banks' villa.
Hell, the idea of flooding the spammers network is older then a reasonably aged Armagnac and was discounted even when it came up.
However it did seem to work much better than anyone expected. The spammers wouldn't have launched an offensive if it had not caused them considerable pain - they'd much rather use the bandwidth for more spam.
How about a third choice - will the internet world try a different method that doesn't involve vigilantism? (and the inevitable chaos that follows a war)
If nothing else works, then vigilantism is the answer. Also, it almost always has been the predecessor to more civilized systems in human history. Makes sense, too - before you can be just and fair and err in dubio pro reo, you've gotta get rid of the worst scum.
anyone who's still getting spam in their inbox should install some nice filtering software.
Who pays for my time installing filters? Certainly not the spammers. This is an economic damage they're doing, plain and simple. It's damage to the society at large. No matter how you twist it, even if you consider bandwidth, CPU and memory to be so cheap it doesn't matter, spammers are intentionally damaging everyone else for personal profit.
They deserve to get one warning to stop, and a slow, painful death if they don't.
I don't necessarily think that vigilantism is the answer,
Why not? It obviously is. Nothing else is working. Once a few spammers have died horrible deaths, or have been mutilated, tortured, branded and hung out in the marketplace covered in honey with a big ant colony nearby, there just might be a reduction of spam.
Spamhaus knows the top 200 or so spammers, many with addresses. $1 from everyone who hates spam and there's a pretty good bounty, and it is cheaper than installing new filters all the time.
Almost no ISP I know (and I am an industry insider) is set up for this. It costs money for no direct profit. And, quite frankly, most ISPs don't give a damn about the damage they do to any non-customers. A lot of smaller ISPs don't even read their abuse@ mailboxes - if those exist at all.
Actually, they are talking about the same thing. Which is precisely why Gates had to reply.
Microsoft Inc. is a big stock company. A lot of it is built on sand^H^H^Hstock and stock options. MS is very dependent on its stock rising continually and anything that might look like a long-term downwards trend would send a snowball into motion that they can't afford.
So both Gates and Wall Street are in fact talking about continued growth or lack of same. Wall Street tries to steer investors away from the PC (and thus Windos) business, Gates tries to steer them back towards it.
if IE7 displayed a dialog that said, "This web site is constructed improperly and might not work as expected" every time it hit an invalid page, things would change VERY FAST.
Yes. People would stop using IE7 faster than you can say "downgrade".
It took me about a month to really get things right on my Linux laptop.
Your expectations might be about, well 16751% above Average Joe's.
It took me about 3 hours to install Kubuntu on my girlfriends computer. From scratch, including download times and enough configuration and training time that she had everything she immediately needed set up and working and knew how to change system settings and install additional software.
She hadn't used Linux before. She's been a happy camper ever since and the Windos partition is left for games.
You have somebody (a reporter) who's job it is to talk to government officials and politicos of all stripes in the NORMAL course of doing his job. So just how, pray tell, is knowing that said reporter talked to official XXX going to give you any clues as to who might be leaking what?
Let's see... maybe because something official XXX (and not many other people) happens to know appears in said reporters article a few days later?
You only need to establish a normal pattern if you do strictly mathematical traffic analysis. If you look beyond the small box there's a whole world out there. The US continued to spy on russian leaders' cell phones long after they started using encryption because there's a lot you can infer from knowing that minister X called the party leader at 3am and later talked to Y while the leader called minister Z. Add a few other intelligence sources to the mix and you have a fairly good picture of what they're up to.
Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time.
Which is to say they both fought dirty. However, Netscape has since been cleaned up (and is now Mozilla/Firefox), IE hasn't. More importantly, we can be almost certain that it was intentionally not improved, because IE for Mac was much, much better, and yet its rendering engine was never moved to IE for Windos.
IE is horribly, horribly broken. I run a number of websites, and my life has been so much easier ever since I realized I'm not for-profit and thus can afford to tell the IE users to get stuffed.
The problem with the "patent trolls" idea is that it's all but indistinguishable from the "small inventor with few resources" one in many cases.
Actually, that may be that case in some isolated cases, but in the vast majority, it is quite clear when you see a patent troll that that's exactly what he is.
Hm, want a checklist?
* Companies is a law firm * Company holds several or many patents * None of the inventors actually work for company, all the patents were acquired * Company does not actually produce any of the patented products * Actually, company doesn't produce anything * Company prominently features "licensing" in its revenue report
5 or more checks and you have a 95% certainty that you have a patent troll.
As reported in the article, there is no evidence the government is tapping or listening in to the calls, merely looking at who's talking to whom.
We call this Signals Intelligence, or more specifically traffic analysis. It is much more useful and informative than you think, especially if you have an entire agency specialised on it for decades. Like, say, the NSA...
If I know exactly who you spoke to, in which order, at what time and for how long, and I have the reliable communication models developed by the NSA and likes, I can tell an awful lot about what you're up to. Stop thinking in individual calls, think patterns. Traffic analysis is sometimes more reliable and almost always more difficult to defeat than intercepting the actual content.
but there's no really good reason to switch if their computers are working right now.
Let's see...
DRM Spyware Trojans XP Home support ending this year Word taking your diploma/love-letter/suicide note with it the 3rd time
I think there's plenty of reasons to switch to Linux. In fact, I've helped a couple of people doing it, and so far none have looked back.
The magic is all in not just doing it, but doing it right. You can't give people a Debian CD and tell 'em "there, be happy". Just like someone getting his very first computer, you'll have to show them the basics. No difference between Windos and Linux there, except that most people encounter Windos first and thus have to re-trained on Linux, but that's not due to one or the other being better, more intuitive or anything, it's just because they had the other thing first.(*)
(*) In fact, my mother's first computer was a Linux machine I built her. For her, windos was the 2nd system she met and she didn't like it one bit.
Build a smarter virus-scanner and virus-authors will write smarter virus code. We've had that 20 years ago.
Automatically running any downloaded code in a sandbox until the user explicitly asks for it to be installed locally (say, after testing it out in the sandbox) would be a much simpler and much more effective step. There's 5-10 others, like not making the default user an admin, etc.
But maybe marketing just didn't "get" them as well as "look here, shiny new technology".
Don't give the suits yet another reason why offshoring is a better alternative.
You've been had. They don't need reasons. They'll just take whatever offers itself, and if nothing does, they'll invent one.
I've been through several insourcing-outsourcing-insourcing-outsourcing cycles. I've come to the firm conclusion that they're all pointless and a total waste of time and ressources. They do, however, have one incredible effect: They make the managers who are responsible for them look progressive, modern, effective, and a dozen other buzzwords.
The problem with unions isn't the unions per se, it often is what they've become. Unions nowadays are often very much like the corporations they allegedly fight. They have hierarchies, and the top people are more managers than anything else.
A firm no to that kind of union.
But a fresh union, now that might be something. And there are many good arguments in favour of unions. One of the most important being that a union and a large enough group of organized workers can put a kind of pressure on a company that you simply can't get any other way.
And in IT, we might have even more power than in other areas. Only transport is as immediately noticeable, but it hits the public. If any modern companies' IT systems were down for the day, they could pretty much close up until the strike is over.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that?
Every celebrity has the freedom to, say, fuck their gardener. What they don't have is privacy - it'll be in the newspapers the next day.
Whoever came up with this should be shot. Seriously. Either use the DNS the way it is designed, or open it up and let everyone make stuff up.
:(((
yahoo.mobi? Idiots who fell for a salesguy with even less brains, and neither of them understand what a hierarchy is supposed to be for.
mobi.yahoo.com - now, was that so difficult? Google gets it - it's "maps.google.com" and not "google.maps". And that's exactly the way the DNS hierarchy is supposed to work - go from the most general towards the more specific. TLD: Generic type, domain name: Owner/Company, subdomain: Purpose.
Ah well, I guess it's too late anyways. Idiots have been running ICANN for years, it was only a matter of time until they fuck up completely. I'm sure this'll go through.
Unfortunately you're confusing freedom with privacy.
I don't think I do.
Freedom is my ability to do what I want to do (within the limits of bla bla, you get the drift)
Privacy is my ability to control information about myself.
If I want to have a nice evening with my secretary, the ability to do so is freedom. The ability to keep it between the two of us is privacy. Your camera example also drives that home.
There is, however, a relation between freedom and privacy that you overlook. Privacy is often a requirement for freedom. It isn't for no reason that when a government goes about hunting the freedom birds, that it goes after privacy very early in the game.
In pure theory, you could have freedom, but no privacy. If everything were taped, but nothing bad ever happens because of that. In the real world, there are leaks, and there are misunderstandinds and there are sadistic assholes in the police and government.
But you can't have privacy and no freedom. Any government that eliminates freedom (i.e. a totalitarian police state) can not let you have privacy. You could plot to overthrow it, or just break some law, and they can't have you do that.
That's why defending privacy is defending freedom. Privacy is one of the first casualties when freedom is attacked. Look at any totalitarian state. How many of them have solid privacy laws (and not just on paper) ?
If some Johnny in Madison Wisconsin finds out a guy named Gray Calx wears women's underwear... does it matter?
To Gray it probably does. A lot. And that's the difference between freedom and privacy - freedom must be defined by a community because my freedom and your freedom might collide, and then we need to have rules as to which is more important. Privacy is no such beast. My privacy and your privacy don't collide, ever. Each of us can define for himself which things he wants to keep private and confidential.
So you can't judge what is and isn't spam on a global level like that.
:)
I totally can, exactly because of the global level. Here's why:
* I live in Germany. Do you think those US mortgage spams would make a deal with me even if I were interested?
* I don't read russian. Whatever those russian spammers are trying to sell, it isn't for me.
* I have a bittorrent client. What do I need porn spam for?
Your old man signed up. That's fine. That's exactly what spam is not. Remember, spam is unsolicited mass-mailings, and almost always to random addresses (i.e. just any and all you can get your dirty hands on).
Name one other method that you can show through historic evidence to work against organized crime.
why would people with nothing to hide want to encrypt their conversations.
Because the dudes at NSA can google for porn if they need some instead of listening in on me and my girl.
Everyone has something to hide. For 99.999% of us it isn't bomb plans or drug deals, but what you did to your secretary yesterday or even just that embarassing personal secret from your teenager days.
One of the very core principles of privacy is that I get to decide what I consider private, not you or the government. Your interest in dressing in women's underwear isn't a state secret, but it might well be that to you it is absolutely important that nobody knows about it.
I think your characterization of the situation is rather short sighted and optimistic. The ultimate goal of Islamic fundamentalism is to dismantle secular institutions and set up an Islamic state.
Ehem... you do realize that Saddam's Iraq was a secular as things get in the near east? And that the new Iraqi government has the Sharia written into its constitution (as in "no law shall violate the Sharia")?
If this were their motivation, they'd be kissing Bushies feet.
Even for Osama, this is only part of his motivation. He's made it abundantly clear in several of his speeches that one of his prime goals is to get the unbelievers out of Saudi Arabia, where Islam's most holy places are located.
I think our success can only be measured by our ability to give Iraq the ability to defend themselves and our ability to make Iraq free.
Then your success so far is exactly zero. Iraq is a more free today, but most of that is on paper and not in real, daily life. Their ability to defend themselves is, well I'd guess there aren't many countries in the world that could not successfully invade Iraq if they had only their own army to defend themselves.
To that end, Iraq has had free elections, we've incorporated the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites into the government and we training of their military is ongoing.
Much of the training is to rebuild something they had 5 years ago. Like a police force. It's not progress, it's a desperate attempt to return to normality.
The free elections, yes. But the "incorporation" isn't going very well, is it? Saddam had kept the nationalities more or less seperated and used them against each other, but at least it was a stable relationship without much bloodshed. Not exactly what we have today, is it?
What progress can insurgents really say they have made since the start of the war?
Wrong scale. At the start of the war, there were no insurgents, so you can't measure their progress from there. You have to measure from the end of the war, when the insurgents first appeared.
And they've made a lot of progress since then. Currently, for example, Basra is falling into their hands, the Brits already admit they don't control the city any longer. And let's not even talk about Baghdad...
And now imagine if they would team up with MS and Vista scans all mails the user sends (it probably does that anyways) and if he is dumb enough to reply to any of those "enlarge your penis" scams, it disconnects the network, permanently.
It'd be 3 days until spam is a thing of the past.
I mean, we've been talking about removing the profit for a long time. Has nobody before me thought about doing it by removing the dumb who are the profit source?
Because these "spam kings" (ok, let's find a new, more acceptable phrase, like "spam dorks") tend to hide out in countries that either have a) no formalized relations with the US or other countries or b) countries that might be allies but will not let us simply go tromping through their country on the hunt for spammers.
Wrong. Of the top 200 spammers, the vast majority is still located in the USofA.
They aren't hiding in the least. We know who they are. But Bush & Co. don't get enough spam, apparently. Otherwise there's be a tank in Alan Ralsky's garden and attack helicopters over Tony Banks' villa.
Hell, the idea of flooding the spammers network is older then a reasonably aged Armagnac and was discounted even when it came up.
However it did seem to work much better than anyone expected. The spammers wouldn't have launched an offensive if it had not caused them considerable pain - they'd much rather use the bandwidth for more spam.
How about a third choice - will the internet world try a different method that doesn't involve vigilantism? (and the inevitable chaos that follows a war)
If nothing else works, then vigilantism is the answer. Also, it almost always has been the predecessor to more civilized systems in human history. Makes sense, too - before you can be just and fair and err in dubio pro reo, you've gotta get rid of the worst scum.
anyone who's still getting spam in their inbox should install some nice filtering software.
Who pays for my time installing filters? Certainly not the spammers. This is an economic damage they're doing, plain and simple. It's damage to the society at large. No matter how you twist it, even if you consider bandwidth, CPU and memory to be so cheap it doesn't matter, spammers are intentionally damaging everyone else for personal profit.
They deserve to get one warning to stop, and a slow, painful death if they don't.
I don't necessarily think that vigilantism is the answer,
Why not? It obviously is. Nothing else is working. Once a few spammers have died horrible deaths, or have been mutilated, tortured, branded and hung out in the marketplace covered in honey with a big ant colony nearby, there just might be a reduction of spam.
Spamhaus knows the top 200 or so spammers, many with addresses. $1 from everyone who hates spam and there's a pretty good bounty, and it is cheaper than installing new filters all the time.
Almost no ISP I know (and I am an industry insider) is set up for this. It costs money for no direct profit. And, quite frankly, most ISPs don't give a damn about the damage they do to any non-customers. A lot of smaller ISPs don't even read their abuse@ mailboxes - if those exist at all.
Actually, they are talking about the same thing. Which is precisely why Gates had to reply.
Microsoft Inc. is a big stock company. A lot of it is built on sand^H^H^Hstock and stock options. MS is very dependent on its stock rising continually and anything that might look like a long-term downwards trend would send a snowball into motion that they can't afford.
So both Gates and Wall Street are in fact talking about continued growth or lack of same. Wall Street tries to steer investors away from the PC (and thus Windos) business, Gates tries to steer them back towards it.
if IE7 displayed a dialog that said, "This web site is constructed improperly and might not work as expected" every time it hit an invalid page, things would change VERY FAST.
Yes. People would stop using IE7 faster than you can say "downgrade".
It took me about a month to really get things right on my Linux laptop.
Your expectations might be about, well 16751% above Average Joe's.
It took me about 3 hours to install Kubuntu on my girlfriends computer. From scratch, including download times and enough configuration and training time that she had everything she immediately needed set up and working and knew how to change system settings and install additional software.
She hadn't used Linux before. She's been a happy camper ever since and the Windos partition is left for games.
You have somebody (a reporter) who's job it is to talk to government officials and politicos of all stripes in the NORMAL course of doing his job. So just how, pray tell, is knowing that said reporter talked to official XXX going to give you any clues as to who might be leaking what?
Let's see... maybe because something official XXX (and not many other people) happens to know appears in said reporters article a few days later?
You only need to establish a normal pattern if you do strictly mathematical traffic analysis. If you look beyond the small box there's a whole world out there. The US continued to spy on russian leaders' cell phones long after they started using encryption because there's a lot you can infer from knowing that minister X called the party leader at 3am and later talked to Y while the leader called minister Z. Add a few other intelligence sources to the mix and you have a fairly good picture of what they're up to.
Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time.
Which is to say they both fought dirty. However, Netscape has since been cleaned up (and is now Mozilla/Firefox), IE hasn't. More importantly, we can be almost certain that it was intentionally not improved, because IE for Mac was much, much better, and yet its rendering engine was never moved to IE for Windos.
IE is horribly, horribly broken. I run a number of websites, and my life has been so much easier ever since I realized I'm not for-profit and thus can afford to tell the IE users to get stuffed.
The problem with the "patent trolls" idea is that it's all but indistinguishable from the "small inventor with few resources" one in many cases.
Actually, that may be that case in some isolated cases, but in the vast majority, it is quite clear when you see a patent troll that that's exactly what he is.
Hm, want a checklist?
* Companies is a law firm
* Company holds several or many patents
* None of the inventors actually work for company, all the patents were acquired
* Company does not actually produce any of the patented products
* Actually, company doesn't produce anything
* Company prominently features "licensing" in its revenue report
5 or more checks and you have a 95% certainty that you have a patent troll.
As reported in the article, there is no evidence the government is tapping or listening in to the calls, merely looking at who's talking to whom.
We call this Signals Intelligence, or more specifically traffic analysis.
It is much more useful and informative than you think, especially if you have an entire agency specialised on it for decades. Like, say, the NSA...
If I know exactly who you spoke to, in which order, at what time and for how long, and I have the reliable communication models developed by the NSA and likes, I can tell an awful lot about what you're up to. Stop thinking in individual calls, think patterns.
Traffic analysis is sometimes more reliable and almost always more difficult to defeat than intercepting the actual content.
but there's no really good reason to switch if their computers are working right now.
Let's see...
DRM
Spyware
Trojans
XP Home support ending this year
Word taking your diploma/love-letter/suicide note with it the 3rd time
I think there's plenty of reasons to switch to Linux. In fact, I've helped a couple of people doing it, and so far none have looked back.
The magic is all in not just doing it, but doing it right. You can't give people a Debian CD and tell 'em "there, be happy". Just like someone getting his very first computer, you'll have to show them the basics. No difference between Windos and Linux there, except that most people encounter Windos first and thus have to re-trained on Linux, but that's not due to one or the other being better, more intuitive or anything, it's just because they had the other thing first.(*)
(*) In fact, my mother's first computer was a Linux machine I built her. For her, windos was the 2nd system she met and she didn't like it one bit.
Build a smarter virus-scanner and virus-authors will write smarter virus code. We've had that 20 years ago.
Automatically running any downloaded code in a sandbox until the user explicitly asks for it to be installed locally (say, after testing it out in the sandbox) would be a much simpler and much more effective step. There's 5-10 others, like not making the default user an admin, etc.
But maybe marketing just didn't "get" them as well as "look here, shiny new technology".
Don't give the suits yet another reason why offshoring is a better alternative.
You've been had. They don't need reasons. They'll just take whatever offers itself, and if nothing does, they'll invent one.
I've been through several insourcing-outsourcing-insourcing-outsourcing cycles. I've come to the firm conclusion that they're all pointless and a total waste of time and ressources. They do, however, have one incredible effect: They make the managers who are responsible for them look progressive, modern, effective, and a dozen other buzzwords.
A year ago, I would've said no, and very firmly.
I'm not so sure anymore.
The problem with unions isn't the unions per se, it often is what they've become. Unions nowadays are often very much like the corporations they allegedly fight. They have hierarchies, and the top people are more managers than anything else.
A firm no to that kind of union.
But a fresh union, now that might be something. And there are many good arguments in favour of unions. One of the most important being that a union and a large enough group of organized workers can put a kind of pressure on a company that you simply can't get any other way.
And in IT, we might have even more power than in other areas. Only transport is as immediately noticeable, but it hits the public. If any modern companies' IT systems were down for the day, they could pretty much close up until the strike is over.