Sure, they're going after governments, but the collateral damage comes from the civilian population - who look to the governments to take some action and actually remove the problem.
Not LulzSec - the average man on the street probably doesn't know who they are and doesn't care until their banking info is out there for the world to see, and then they're going to blame LulsSec, NOT the banks or the government.
I really think Luls and Anon are not out to do any actual good in the world, they just want to laugh and they really don't care who gets hurt in the process. I mean, it's certainly not them or anyone they know, so who cares, right?
To even have to enter into litigation means I failed in my job.
Much safer to keep data and process under my own roof than to rely on some dodgy outside vendor.
I'm actually facing this issue today. I've got an hosted apps vendor who wants to put our software on his cloud. My thoughts are
1) you can lecture me all day long about HIPAA, but the truth is, if something goes wrong on my servers, I'm to blame. If it goes wrong on your servers, I don't know who to blame and all the lawyers in the world won't tell me who needs to wind up in a ditch. And honestly, I don't have a problem with someone winding up in a ditch if they misappropriated my data. 2) why should i pay you more money to host my apps? They're *paid* for already. The servers are *paid* for. It's all *paid* for and now you want me to throw money out the window to pay you to put our apps on the servers that you *haven't finished paying for*?
The cloud is just as safe as your internal network, and they require equal effort to make them so.
The difference is that my internal solutions are not subject to arbitrary sales to unknown third-parties with resultant change in the TOS. Everything outside my network that is publicly hosted is subject to arbitrary changes in service level, privacy agreements, etc. due to politics which I will have little or no say in.
So, the cloud may offer some advantages but ultimately, the data is *my* responsibility and I refuse to trust that third parties will guard it with the same level of bloodthirsty tenacity that I will.
But I guess I am expecting too much for people to RTFM.
Yes, you are. The inherent promise of a GUI is that you won't *have* to use a key combo to perform an action. And most users have learned the 5 or 6 keystrokes they find useful or interesting, just like you have, but *that one wasn't one of them*.
Google really needs to hire a usability expert rather than some harebrained post-grad who would better serve the world by flipping burgers.
Failure to adhere up to the terms of a contract can be a crime in certain jurisdictions.
While that doesn't excuse torture or other means of extreme coercion, we do need penalties harsh enough to make potential contract-breakers really think about it beforehand.
Economic crimes should not be tolerated just because no one gets physically hurt.
IMO, this is not a technical issue, it's a social issue that cannot be solved thru technical means. Twitter and Facebook are marketed to people who don't have time to create complex, nuanced opinion or the capacity to digest the same. Given that these same people have a degree of anonymity (their followers don't have the time/ability to track down the actual people behind the accounts) they are stuck in a vicious cycle of creating extreme opinions lest they alienate followers.
Additionally, extreme opinions are more "interesting" than complex opinion.
You want reasoned public debate, you have to make users start before they ever lay hands on the keyboard.
The real problem is that people want sprawling houses, and are not comfortable living in smaller places.
That's a pretty gross generalization.
I mean, why bother living in a small apartment downtown when I can get a sprawling, waste of space out in the 'burbs, and drive 20 miles each way?
This depends on the conditions in the downtown area. In my experience, a house in the suburbs is considerably cheaper than an apartment downtown.
People raise kids in NYC and in other big cities. You can just put your kids in a private school, and they can take the train or the bus to get to where they want.
Only if you're made of money. The vast majority of people would not be able to afford a private school for their children.
No, I think this is a great idea. Some of us ride bikes and take buses and trains. And we do not live out in suburbs, and even live in neighborhoods which are well connected with good, public transportation.
Terrific. Now bring that to my city and we might sign on to it. But don't hold your breath - the politics behind public transportation are such that the people who actually need are usually the ones who can't afford it and politicians are loathe to do anything that actually affects rich people.
As a scientist, you have an ethical obligation to report particularly dangerous crimes. Sounds like this guy was boasting about coopting his hospital's systems and using them to fight other bot nets. That has a potential for killing people that compromised computers normally don't have.
This seems to imply that there are crimes you don't report. Is there some sort of ethical standard for what gets reported and what doesn't or is it left to the judgement of the scientist?
Well, Slashdot being comprised of a large number of cynical, jaded people who have worked in engineering related jobs... we look for the ways this will go horribly wrong first, and then decide if those outweigh the planned benefits. If your false-positive/false-negative rate is too high, your system becomes junk.
This reminds me a lot of polygraphs... voice-stress analysis might be a lot smarter than we expect it to be... but, there's a reason why polygraphs aren't admissible in many places in court. It's vague and subjective in a lot of cases. As a result, associated technology isn't always readily trusted by some of us.
It makes sense to ensure that the system isn't going to fail, because the one time it does, potentially, someone dies. Then there are lawsuits and political hearings and no one wants that.
In most real-world jobs that I've worked in, it's more about being able to shuffle data from one pile to another efficiently, rather than working the math (which is, at best, uncertain). I say this from the background of having a degree in Drama and yet, I still have a decent job as a programmer doing real work (not as a manager, either).
The major problem with switching to applied computer science is figuring out which technologies or sets of technologies are going to be truly useful going forward. It could be argued that all of them are, but some of the current crop have yet to prove themselves, except in specialized cases.
I would argue that real-world programming, if one has some sort of talent or bent toward it, can probably be taught in two years (or less) concurrent with subjects on techniques in specialized areas. This would lead to most programmers needing, at best, an associates degree.
Being a sysadmin is not about you and the system and your marvelous detecting and repair skills, it's *always and only* about your users. If VM technology improves the speed of recovery so the users can get back to what they were doing (probably messing up your carefully architected system), then so be it.
The price you pay has little to do with damages. A doctor is not somehow immune to malpractice if he decides not to charge you.
Damages are not just to recover what you have paid.
It's a question of entitlement - is he somehow entitled to Facebook?
I would argue that he is not, as he doesn't actually pay anything directly to Facebook for their services and has not entered into a contract specifying a set guaranteed level of service. If the situation were different, then he might have a case against them for cutting him off, but only in very specific circumstances.
As it is now, my opinion is that he's trying to make someone else pay for his own foolishness, at best. At worst, again, my opinion, is that it's a money-grab.
The second issue raised, where potentially a company could fork over enough money to block some other service - that's really bad, but I don't see it ever happening despite scare quotes like the ones the article provides. There's simply no way customers would put up with it, and the company being blocked could easily sue the company paying for the block. So who would actually do that?
You underestimate the power of marketing. If you say it loudly enough, long enough, and with enough attractive models, you could convince people of anything.
Remember that you are being frightened in order to be OK with giving over more control over an inherently open internet, to those that want to control content. It's under the guise of protecting you but the first thing you should do when someone says "I'm here to protect you from a horrible danger" is to be very suspicious and ask a lot of questions to find out if in fact there's really a credible threat.
Tell that the the average man on the street. They'll tell you everything is fine and be perfectly happy. They will happily sign over control of their internet access and content because the people in charge "couldn't possibly do anything *really* harmful, could they?"
You've got a great idea to increase company profitability in the short term and decrease their reliance on labor in the long term. The man's ears will perk up in a Pavlovian response common to all managers. When the drool is dripping from the edge of his mouth and he's practically raising his desk with a financial woodie and he breathlessly asks you how... tell him:
Ask the programmers to work longer hours with no extra compensation or stock.
Seriously, count up your savings and hand the guy your socially-acceptable-minimum-advance-notice of resignation.
A bunch of internet vigilantes perform a Denial-of-Access-to-Information Attack in an attempt to get a court judgement in another country overturned in the vain hopes that the majority of people won't view them as little more than spoiled brat troublemakers...
You know, MLK and his people braved fire-hoses, dogs and shotguns at close range.
The worst you guys have is running out of Mountain Dew and porn.
This really looks like a case of the little guy stomping on the littler guy, though (well, technically, they're both gals).
That doesn't make it right, but lets keep the proper perspective here. In fact, it's slightly worse, since it's one little publisher trying to claw her way past a littler gal, when she should be doing everything she can to court the smaller publishers of content.
That way they all get a piece of the pie...
Christ, that's one metaphor too many. But hopefully you get my point.
Corporations had to settle on something. Microsoft won out primarily because the browser was a) bundled and b) made by the same company as the operating system. It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.
/quote>
That's the same mentality that led us to "to big to fail" and we're seeing how that turned out. Making a decision also implies being able to face the consequences of that decision and now it's time for consequences. Instead, they're trying to avoid them by forcing everyone else down to their level and retarding the development of the web.
Yes, Microsoft shares some complicity in this, but the bulk of it lies with the corporations who refuse to face the music and move on.
In this particular instance, I say: let the chips fall where they may. Regardless of the consequences.
And before anyone points out that it's easy to make that statement because I don't face the same consequences? You're right - I chose correctly.
Why is it that every insignificant little snippet of HTML becomes an important historical artifact? Seriously, guys, just delete it and move on. It's dead tech and should be consigned to the trash heap.
Will the world be a better place tomorrow because of this site? I seriously doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, they're going after governments, but the collateral damage comes from the civilian population - who look to the governments to take some action and actually remove the problem.
Not LulzSec - the average man on the street probably doesn't know who they are and doesn't care until their banking info is out there for the world to see, and then they're going to blame LulsSec, NOT the banks or the government.
I really think Luls and Anon are not out to do any actual good in the world, they just want to laugh and they really don't care who gets hurt in the process. I mean, it's certainly not them or anyone they know, so who cares, right?
We can be very conservative at times, too.
You can be as gay as you want.
You can smoke weed.
You can hold all kinds of surprising and non-conformist opinions.
But you goddamn well better be polite about it.
I'm not comfortable keeping data entrusted to me on a provider who can walk away from a data loss with no penalties due to the Terms of Service.
At least when it's on my systems, someone is going to take a fall for data loss, even if it's me. And I'm OK with that.
To even have to enter into litigation means I failed in my job.
Much safer to keep data and process under my own roof than to rely on some dodgy outside vendor.
I'm actually facing this issue today. I've got an hosted apps vendor who wants to put our software on his cloud. My thoughts are
1) you can lecture me all day long about HIPAA, but the truth is, if something goes wrong on my servers, I'm to blame. If it goes wrong on your servers, I don't know who to blame and all the lawyers in the world won't tell me who needs to wind up in a ditch. And honestly, I don't have a problem with someone winding up in a ditch if they misappropriated my data.
2) why should i pay you more money to host my apps? They're *paid* for already. The servers are *paid* for. It's all *paid* for and now you want me to throw money out the window to pay you to put our apps on the servers that you *haven't finished paying for*?
The cloud is just as safe as your internal network, and they require equal effort to make them so.
The difference is that my internal solutions are not subject to arbitrary sales to unknown third-parties with resultant change in the TOS. Everything outside my network that is publicly hosted is subject to arbitrary changes in service level, privacy agreements, etc. due to politics which I will have little or no say in.
So, the cloud may offer some advantages but ultimately, the data is *my* responsibility and I refuse to trust that third parties will guard it with the same level of bloodthirsty tenacity that I will.
But I guess I am expecting too much for people to RTFM.
Yes, you are. The inherent promise of a GUI is that you won't *have* to use a key combo to perform an action. And most users have learned the 5 or 6 keystrokes they find useful or interesting, just like you have, but *that one wasn't one of them*.
Google really needs to hire a usability expert rather than some harebrained post-grad who would better serve the world by flipping burgers.
There actually *is* an app for that.
iTerm2.
Now quit enabling your girlfriend's issues with laziness.
Failure to adhere up to the terms of a contract can be a crime in certain jurisdictions.
While that doesn't excuse torture or other means of extreme coercion, we do need penalties harsh enough to make potential contract-breakers really think about it beforehand.
Economic crimes should not be tolerated just because no one gets physically hurt.
IMO, this is not a technical issue, it's a social issue that cannot be solved thru technical means. Twitter and Facebook are marketed to people who don't have time to create complex, nuanced opinion or the capacity to digest the same. Given that these same people have a degree of anonymity (their followers don't have the time/ability to track down the actual people behind the accounts) they are stuck in a vicious cycle of creating extreme opinions lest they alienate followers.
Additionally, extreme opinions are more "interesting" than complex opinion.
You want reasoned public debate, you have to make users start before they ever lay hands on the keyboard.
I'm reminded of the company who offered bonuses to the QA team for every bug found in their code. Suddenly, bugs were being found on a regular basis.
Then someone realized that programmers were getting kickbacks.
The real problem is that people want sprawling houses, and are not comfortable living in smaller places.
That's a pretty gross generalization.
I mean, why bother living in a small apartment downtown when I can get a sprawling, waste of space out in the 'burbs, and drive 20 miles each way?
This depends on the conditions in the downtown area. In my experience, a house in the suburbs is considerably cheaper than an apartment downtown.
People raise kids in NYC and in other big cities. You can just put your kids in a private school, and they can take the train or the bus to get to where they want.
Only if you're made of money. The vast majority of people would not be able to afford a private school for their children.
No, I think this is a great idea. Some of us ride bikes and take buses and trains. And we do not live out in suburbs, and even live in neighborhoods which are well connected with good, public transportation.
Terrific. Now bring that to my city and we might sign on to it. But don't hold your breath - the politics behind public transportation are such that the people who actually need are usually the ones who can't afford it and politicians are loathe to do anything that actually affects rich people.
As a scientist, you have an ethical obligation to report particularly dangerous crimes. Sounds like this guy was boasting about coopting his hospital's systems and using them to fight other bot nets. That has a potential for killing people that compromised computers normally don't have.
This seems to imply that there are crimes you don't report. Is there some sort of ethical standard for what gets reported and what doesn't or is it left to the judgement of the scientist?
Well, Slashdot being comprised of a large number of cynical, jaded people who have worked in engineering related jobs ... we look for the ways this will go horribly wrong first, and then decide if those outweigh the planned benefits. If your false-positive/false-negative rate is too high, your system becomes junk.
This reminds me a lot of polygraphs ... voice-stress analysis might be a lot smarter than we expect it to be ... but, there's a reason why polygraphs aren't admissible in many places in court. It's vague and subjective in a lot of cases. As a result, associated technology isn't always readily trusted by some of us.
It makes sense to ensure that the system isn't going to fail, because the one time it does, potentially, someone dies. Then there are lawsuits and political hearings and no one wants that.
In most real-world jobs that I've worked in, it's more about being able to shuffle data from one pile to another efficiently, rather than working the math (which is, at best, uncertain). I say this from the background of having a degree in Drama and yet, I still have a decent job as a programmer doing real work (not as a manager, either).
The major problem with switching to applied computer science is figuring out which technologies or sets of technologies are going to be truly useful going forward. It could be argued that all of them are, but some of the current crop have yet to prove themselves, except in specialized cases.
I would argue that real-world programming, if one has some sort of talent or bent toward it, can probably be taught in two years (or less) concurrent with subjects on techniques in specialized areas. This would lead to most programmers needing, at best, an associates degree.
Seriously, which way gets the job done faster?
Being a sysadmin is not about you and the system and your marvelous detecting and repair skills, it's *always and only* about your users. If VM technology improves the speed of recovery so the users can get back to what they were doing (probably messing up your carefully architected system), then so be it.
The price you pay has little to do with damages. A doctor is not somehow immune to malpractice if he decides not to charge you.
Damages are not just to recover what you have paid.
It's a question of entitlement - is he somehow entitled to Facebook?
I would argue that he is not, as he doesn't actually pay anything directly to Facebook for their services and has not entered into a contract specifying a set guaranteed level of service. If the situation were different, then he might have a case against them for cutting him off, but only in very specific circumstances.
As it is now, my opinion is that he's trying to make someone else pay for his own foolishness, at best. At worst, again, my opinion, is that it's a money-grab.
Your doctor analogy is specious.
The second issue raised, where potentially a company could fork over enough money to block some other service - that's really bad, but I don't see it ever happening despite scare quotes like the ones the article provides. There's simply no way customers would put up with it, and the company being blocked could easily sue the company paying for the block. So who would actually do that?
You underestimate the power of marketing. If you say it loudly enough, long enough, and with enough attractive models, you could convince people of anything.
Remember that you are being frightened in order to be OK with giving over more control over an inherently open internet, to those that want to control content. It's under the guise of protecting you but the first thing you should do when someone says "I'm here to protect you from a horrible danger" is to be very suspicious and ask a lot of questions to find out if in fact there's really a credible threat.
Tell that the the average man on the street. They'll tell you everything is fine and be perfectly happy. They will happily sign over control of their internet access and content because the people in charge "couldn't possibly do anything *really* harmful, could they?"
You've got a great idea to increase company profitability in the short term and decrease their reliance on labor in the long term. The man's ears will perk up in a Pavlovian response common to all managers. When the drool is dripping from the edge of his mouth and he's practically raising his desk with a financial woodie and he breathlessly asks you how ... tell him:
Ask the programmers to work longer hours with no extra compensation or stock.
Seriously, count up your savings and hand the guy your socially-acceptable-minimum-advance-notice of resignation.
Personally, I hope no one rescues the music industry.
Let it die, put those people out of work, and start anew.
Really? So, the 1.5 million victims in all of this can go to hell along with Gawker?
I guess the words "measured response" don't really mean anything to you ...
Sentence him according to the economic damage he's caused.
Then force him to repay it.
A DOS attack! That'll show 'em!
A bunch of internet vigilantes perform a Denial-of-Access-to-Information Attack in an attempt to get a court judgement in another country overturned in the vain hopes that the majority of people won't view them as little more than spoiled brat troublemakers ...
You know, MLK and his people braved fire-hoses, dogs and shotguns at close range.
The worst you guys have is running out of Mountain Dew and porn.
This really looks like a case of the little guy stomping on the littler guy, though (well, technically, they're both gals).
That doesn't make it right, but lets keep the proper perspective here. In fact, it's slightly worse, since it's one little publisher trying to claw her way past a littler gal, when she should be doing everything she can to court the smaller publishers of content.
That way they all get a piece of the pie ...
Christ, that's one metaphor too many. But hopefully you get my point.
Corporations had to settle on something. Microsoft won out primarily because the browser was a) bundled and b) made by the same company as the operating system. It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.
/quote>
That's the same mentality that led us to "to big to fail" and we're seeing how that turned out. Making a decision also implies being able to face the consequences of that decision and now it's time for consequences. Instead, they're trying to avoid them by forcing everyone else down to their level and retarding the development of the web.
Yes, Microsoft shares some complicity in this, but the bulk of it lies with the corporations who refuse to face the music and move on.
In this particular instance, I say: let the chips fall where they may. Regardless of the consequences.
And before anyone points out that it's easy to make that statement because I don't face the same consequences? You're right - I chose correctly.
For now.
Why is it that every insignificant little snippet of HTML becomes an important historical artifact? Seriously, guys, just delete it and move on. It's dead tech and should be consigned to the trash heap.
Will the world be a better place tomorrow because of this site? I seriously doubt it.