Last time I checked, the entire company was losing money, except the divisions where these privacy "black eyes" occured. The entertainment side of the business which was doing quite well, it was mainly the hardware side that is losing which isn't tied at all to the various evils we all talk about.
The public at large doesn't give a shit about this kind of thing, which isn't really all that unreasonable. The slashdot crowd is very privacy/security conscious.. the general publis is not. Lest we forget when the network was hacked the first time around, the biggest, loudest complaint was not that CC info was leaked, along with personal details, but that the network was down and people couldn’t play the games they paid for.
Even the rootkit thing. Again, the biggest reaction from the general public, even with all the news coverage, was “well that was naughty of them..”.
Almost all companies are evil. Sony happens to be evil in a way that is perceived as particularly bad by the Slashdot community, but perceived as status quo by the general public.
And of course, even if everyone that even remembers the rootkit thing stopped using Sony for the rest of their life and recommended to all their friends that they do the same, wouldn't make a dent in the profit statements. Which means they don't care about us either!
Isn't there some rarely visited slashdot offshoot for this kinda stuff? A place with nicer graphics where suits could happily spew buzzwords at each other and make comments like "Great post , very informative!".
I think that what a lot of the slashdot crowd forgets is that the reason all these things we hate go on is because the public in general is ok with them. We care about these issues and are baffled by the fact that others don't.. but they care about stuff we don't. If everyone _really_ hated the TSA, or was upset about the ongoing errosion of privacy, or patent insanity, or IP nonsense.. it would be stopped immediately. Truth is there is only a small group that care about these things.. we just perceive it as a huge thing because we hear about it constantly in our chosen circles.
A lot of what the TSA does is not designed for security, but to provide the illusion of it. We get this. The illusion however is effective to those who either don't get it or don't care.
This isn't just specific to us either. It happens in most areas. I'm sure there are groups who feel passionately about other things that we really should be paying attention to but could give a shit about. That's just the way this stuff works.
At the very minimum, we have to accept that we represent a minority opinion on issues such as privacy and security.. and move from there. Assuming the public would be outraged and fall in behind us if we could only explain it to them correctly is not gonna get us anywhere.
Shitty situation, but I can actually see OSIs point. If I saw the OSHWA logo without prior background I probably would assume it was some how tied to OSI due to the similarity, which kinda defeats the whole point of a trademark.
Also as I understand it, when it comes to trademarks if you don't make efforts to protect it, you lose it.
Hopefully they come to some kind of amicable agreement. I think both sides are reasonable enough that they can come up with some way to fix this without us reading about the ongoing court battle for the next 2 years.
The same type will cry about identity theft and how "no one is doing anything about it", then complain bitterly when they have to punch a pin number in to use their card.
I can't even find a bank that will offer me two factor authentication here in Atlantic Canada. RBC will do it for _corproate_ customers.. which is even more maddening because it means they have the infrastruction in place, they just won't let us peons down here use it..
Paypal offers better security than my bank. If I'd said that not to long ago people would look at me funny.. kinda sad!
It's also a lesson in not putting all your eggs in one basket.
That one _is_ apple specific. Tight integration has it's price. If someone gets into my email, I won't lose access to every damn piece of technology I own. I actually find it pretty damn impressive how much damage they managed to pull off.
Sure, but getting the data wasn't a goal here. Infact, they appear to specifically wiped out the data. It's the accounts that are valuable, not what is in them.
Parent is on the right track though. You need some way to decide in advance how much of a pain it will be to recover down the road. Personally I'd love an option where they made it very difficult, even if at a cost to myself (like they actually verify my identity.. and charge me $200 for the time..).
The absolute problem is that no matter how many authentication factors you add, recovery will always be the weakest link.
People will always lose their tokens, and they will always need a way of getting access to their account.. and that way is usually someone making minimum wage with 3 weeks of training.
Personally I wish there was a way to opt out of recovery. Basically a "I accept the risk, if I ever lose my token and forget my recovery questions / password.. I'm shit out of luck" option. This option would have to make it literally impossible for a support person to greant access to the account.. because if they technically can, someone will social engineer one to do so...
Scientific approach aside, I think the more interested you are in something, not just a musical genre, the more you are inclined to notice the components which differentiate one from the other. If you aren’t interested in a specific genre of music, then yeah, it’s all going to sound the same because your brain goes into "ugh, techo" mode.
My music tastes tend to hover around the classic/progressive rock band. Most Techo/electric/dubstep/house/etc all sounds the same to me because my brain doesn’t even spend the effort to actually listen (where it would notice the differences) and just goes “ick”. Same with pop music, country, rap.. (especially rap!).
Do you also believe the ACLU, EFF, and the like are extremists?
Yes.
Is everyone who holds people to higher standards than you do an "extremist?"
When those standards are extreme, yes. Thus extremist.
I never said this was a bad thing. The world needs extremists tugging on both ends. My point was that one doesn't look to an extremist for a pragmatic opinion. Doing so is contradictory.
Lets have a word list!
Pragmatic: Dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations. Extremist: A person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views, esp. one who resorts to or advocates extreme action.
This is actually a surprisingly rational opinion from him (he at least acknoledges that there is some good to this..), but at the end of the day he is still an extremist.
The main point is liability. If you put something in public domain, and it ends up say, as part of the coffee maker temperature controller on an airplane, malfunctions, and leads to loss of life.. you could be liable. The BSD specifically spells out that the author is not liable.
_if_ we find anything, it's going to along the lines of finding some indicator that there is a distinct possibility that maybe, just maybe, at one point there was an environment that could have supported say.. some bacteria.
Not saying this isn't incredible, and I personally am fascinated by it all.. but I do understand why the world isn't on the edge of their seats..
Diplomacy and international politics are also both important for our continued survival. For that matter so is the global economy.
All the science in the world isn't going to help us if we blow ourselves up, or our system of managing resources and man power falls apart. You ask someone who works in either of these areas.. I mean who is really involved.. and they will pretty much parrot _exactly_ what you said, with appropriate fields replaced.
Everyone wants to put their area of interest in a special category. Everyone can make a case that the thing _they_ care about is really the most critical and anyone who doesn't get that just doesn't understand reality.
I generally think having people working on the thing that interests them is important, even if there are better things they could be doing that don't. Mainly for two reasons:
a) Someone working on something they are passionate about is going to achive way more.
b) I tend to subscribe to James Burkes school of thought when it comes to progress. If you haven't read is work (or seen the amazing Connections series) the basic idea is that what drives change is largely unpredictable. Advances in one area lead to advances in completely unrelated areas. Thus, you never know what seemingly insignificant thing might drive a major advancement. Maybe someone will be working on something to make penises bigger and discover something that eventually leads to a cure to some major disease.
There’s insanely amazing stuff happening every day. Marvels of human achievement and technology all around us. And for each, there is usually a group of people around it who:
a) lives and breaths the stuff b) can’t fathom why everyone else doesn’t feel the same way
It doesn’t work like this. Even if you could some how identify the one absolute “top of the pile” thing that everyone should be focusing on, it’s completely impractical for everyone to do so. It’s the same reason we can’t have every scientist in the world working on say, cancer research. You need some of them to be trying to figure out how to get rid of wrinkles.
Some people don’t care about space. A lot of people don’t care about space. Arguing that they should care about space because it’s a more “worthy” thing to care about than whatever they do care about is just ridiculous.
As to trying to frame the story so it’s more in-line with the stuff they are interested in... even more ridiculous. You can’t trick someone into caring about technology by turning it into a human interest story.
And if there was a law stating I had to keep a copy of all my personal documents at said electronics shop.. your demonstration would be a good thing to point to as a reason why this is a bad idea..
I'm normally not a fan of this stuff, but in this case it actually makes a good point.
They've shown that they can steal data from the ISP.
If a bunch of your personal data starts being stored at the ISP, they or other criminals could steal that data as well. Basically having the data there is putting customers at great risk, and they have just demonstrated that the ISP is incapable of protecting the data.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked, the entire company was losing money, except the divisions where these privacy "black eyes" occured. The entertainment side of the business which was doing quite well, it was mainly the hardware side that is losing which isn't tied at all to the various evils we all talk about.
Depends on which people you are talking about.
The public at large doesn't give a shit about this kind of thing, which isn't really all that unreasonable. The slashdot crowd is very privacy/security conscious.. the general publis is not. Lest we forget when the network was hacked the first time around, the biggest, loudest complaint was not that CC info was leaked, along with personal details, but that the network was down and people couldn’t play the games they paid for.
Even the rootkit thing. Again, the biggest reaction from the general public, even with all the news coverage, was “well that was naughty of them..”.
Almost all companies are evil. Sony happens to be evil in a way that is perceived as particularly bad by the Slashdot community, but perceived as status quo by the general public.
And of course, even if everyone that even remembers the rootkit thing stopped using Sony for the rest of their life and recommended to all their friends that they do the same, wouldn't make a dent in the profit statements. Which means they don't care about us either!
Isn't there some rarely visited slashdot offshoot for this kinda stuff? A place with nicer graphics where suits could happily spew buzzwords at each other and make comments like "Great post , very informative!".
Why is this here :(
How do you figure that?
I think that what a lot of the slashdot crowd forgets is that the reason all these things we hate go on is because the public in general is ok with them. We care about these issues and are baffled by the fact that others don't.. but they care about stuff we don't. If everyone _really_ hated the TSA, or was upset about the ongoing errosion of privacy, or patent insanity, or IP nonsense.. it would be stopped immediately. Truth is there is only a small group that care about these things.. we just perceive it as a huge thing because we hear about it constantly in our chosen circles.
A lot of what the TSA does is not designed for security, but to provide the illusion of it. We get this. The illusion however is effective to those who either don't get it or don't care.
This isn't just specific to us either. It happens in most areas. I'm sure there are groups who feel passionately about other things that we really should be paying attention to but could give a shit about. That's just the way this stuff works.
At the very minimum, we have to accept that we represent a minority opinion on issues such as privacy and security.. and move from there. Assuming the public would be outraged and fall in behind us if we could only explain it to them correctly is not gonna get us anywhere.
It's one of those annoying media sensationalism gimmicks that is way overused.
Yup.
Shitty situation, but I can actually see OSIs point. If I saw the OSHWA logo without prior background I probably would assume it was some how tied to OSI due to the similarity, which kinda defeats the whole point of a trademark.
Also as I understand it, when it comes to trademarks if you don't make efforts to protect it, you lose it.
Hopefully they come to some kind of amicable agreement. I think both sides are reasonable enough that they can come up with some way to fix this without us reading about the ongoing court battle for the next 2 years.
Oh totally with you there!
The same type will cry about identity theft and how "no one is doing anything about it", then complain bitterly when they have to punch a pin number in to use their card.
Totally.
I can't even find a bank that will offer me two factor authentication here in Atlantic Canada. RBC will do it for _corproate_ customers.. which is even more maddening because it means they have the infrastruction in place, they just won't let us peons down here use it..
Paypal offers better security than my bank. If I'd said that not to long ago people would look at me funny.. kinda sad!
It's also a lesson in not putting all your eggs in one basket.
That one _is_ apple specific. Tight integration has it's price. If someone gets into my email, I won't lose access to every damn piece of technology I own. I actually find it pretty damn impressive how much damage they managed to pull off.
Sure, but getting the data wasn't a goal here. Infact, they appear to specifically wiped out the data. It's the accounts that are valuable, not what is in them.
Recovery will still be the weak point.
Parent is on the right track though. You need some way to decide in advance how much of a pain it will be to recover down the road. Personally I'd love an option where they made it very difficult, even if at a cost to myself (like they actually verify my identity.. and charge me $200 for the time..).
The absolute problem is that no matter how many authentication factors you add, recovery will always be the weakest link.
People will always lose their tokens, and they will always need a way of getting access to their account.. and that way is usually someone making minimum wage with 3 weeks of training.
Personally I wish there was a way to opt out of recovery. Basically a "I accept the risk, if I ever lose my token and forget my recovery questions / password.. I'm shit out of luck" option. This option would have to make it literally impossible for a support person to greant access to the account.. because if they technically can, someone will social engineer one to do so...
To further complicate things however, it is not directly tied to perception either..
In other words, it doesn't actually sound 8 times louder...
Scientific approach aside, I think the more interested you are in something, not just a musical genre, the more you are inclined to notice the components which differentiate one from the other. If you aren’t interested in a specific genre of music, then yeah, it’s all going to sound the same because your brain goes into "ugh, techo" mode.
My music tastes tend to hover around the classic/progressive rock band. Most Techo/electric/dubstep/house/etc all sounds the same to me because my brain doesn’t even spend the effort to actually listen (where it would notice the differences) and just goes “ick”. Same with pop music, country, rap.. (especially rap!).
Do you also believe the ACLU, EFF, and the like are extremists?
Yes.
Is everyone who holds people to higher standards than you do an "extremist?"
When those standards are extreme, yes. Thus extremist.
I never said this was a bad thing. The world needs extremists tugging on both ends. My point was that one doesn't look to an extremist for a pragmatic opinion. Doing so is contradictory.
Lets have a word list!
Pragmatic: Dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.
Extremist: A person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views, esp. one who resorts to or advocates extreme action.
Didn't say it was a bad thing..
You need extremists, yes. That doesn't mean we should look to them for pragmatic opinions...
When it comes to RMS.. not really.
This is actually a surprisingly rational opinion from him (he at least acknoledges that there is some good to this..), but at the end of the day he is still an extremist.
They actually took that clause out ..
The main point is liability. If you put something in public domain, and it ends up say, as part of the coffee maker temperature controller on an airplane, malfunctions, and leads to loss of life.. you could be liable. The BSD specifically spells out that the author is not liable.
Unless they walk and talk.. probably not.
_if_ we find anything, it's going to along the lines of finding some indicator that there is a distinct possibility that maybe, just maybe, at one point there was an environment that could have supported say.. some bacteria.
Not saying this isn't incredible, and I personally am fascinated by it all.. but I do understand why the world isn't on the edge of their seats..
Diplomacy and international politics are also both important for our continued survival. For that matter so is the global economy.
All the science in the world isn't going to help us if we blow ourselves up, or our system of managing resources and man power falls apart. You ask someone who works in either of these areas.. I mean who is really involved.. and they will pretty much parrot _exactly_ what you said, with appropriate fields replaced.
Everyone wants to put their area of interest in a special category. Everyone can make a case that the thing _they_ care about is really the most critical and anyone who doesn't get that just doesn't understand reality.
I generally think having people working on the thing that interests them is important, even if there are better things they could be doing that don't. Mainly for two reasons:
a) Someone working on something they are passionate about is going to achive way more.
b) I tend to subscribe to James Burkes school of thought when it comes to progress. If you haven't read is work (or seen the amazing Connections series) the basic idea is that what drives change is largely unpredictable. Advances in one area lead to advances in completely unrelated areas. Thus, you never know what seemingly insignificant thing might drive a major advancement. Maybe someone will be working on something to make penises bigger and discover something that eventually leads to a cure to some major disease.
Yes, yes.. let the butt hurt flow through you..
There’s insanely amazing stuff happening every day. Marvels of human achievement and technology all around us. And for each, there is usually a group of people around it who:
a) lives and breaths the stuff
b) can’t fathom why everyone else doesn’t feel the same way
It doesn’t work like this. Even if you could some how identify the one absolute “top of the pile” thing that everyone should be focusing on, it’s completely impractical for everyone to do so. It’s the same reason we can’t have every scientist in the world working on say, cancer research. You need some of them to be trying to figure out how to get rid of wrinkles.
Some people don’t care about space. A lot of people don’t care about space. Arguing that they should care about space because it’s a more “worthy” thing to care about than whatever they do care about is just ridiculous.
As to trying to frame the story so it’s more in-line with the stuff they are interested in... even more ridiculous. You can’t trick someone into caring about technology by turning it into a human interest story.
Right.
And if there was a law stating I had to keep a copy of all my personal documents at said electronics shop.. your demonstration would be a good thing to point to as a reason why this is a bad idea..
I'm normally not a fan of this stuff, but in this case it actually makes a good point.
They've shown that they can steal data from the ISP.
If a bunch of your personal data starts being stored at the ISP, they or other criminals could steal that data as well. Basically having the data there is putting customers at great risk, and they have just demonstrated that the ISP is incapable of protecting the data.