Your data should be safer on a properly maintained cloud than it is on your own hardware. I think in this case though, while Yahoo did get income from people using it, the people who's data they were storing would not have any recourse should their data get lost. I haven't read the EULA, but I think it's safe to say that it has something in it along the lines of "If we screw up and lose all your data you can assured that the sympathy you receive from us will be of the highest quality".
On the other hand, a cloud operator would be taking your money directly and would have a certain SLA to meet.
That being said, if a cloud did ever fail in Yahoo-like spectacular fashion, I'm sure that the senior staff would have an infallible backup plan, presumably along the lines of a tunnel direct to a country offering safe harbour.
Most of the time the problem is not 'the cloud' itself, but reachability. The cloud can have all the 9's it wants, but (at least for some parts of the world) the sort of SLA's with enough 9's to match the uptime of the cloud cost more $$$ than hosting the solution on site.
And no matter what SLA's you have with your ISP, a backhoe operator can take you out for hours, or even days. You can back it up with wireless for email and stuff but I don't believe that wireless can cope with the sort of bandwidth requirements of a hosted solution like Google Apps, especially if said backhoe operator takes out all internet access in a local area, and _everyone_ switches over to their wireless backup.
Still... at least you can leave the office for the day and go bowling:)
At least we'll have something worth exporting. I'm sure lots of other countries will be only too happy to buy our blacklists which we have meticulously researched.
except... we'll probably just be importing them from somewhere else...
There was also talk of a proposal whereby if you discuss the order to hand over the key with anyone, you can get 5 years in prison.
That goes against every UK and US cop show I've ever watched. I thought you were always allowed to insist on legal representation before answering any questions.
Surely you'd have to be allowed to discuss with a lawyer whether the cops finding the kid you have tied up in the basement of a secret location is going to land you a worse sentence than not handing over the encryption keys...
Is there a system which will allow the use of a 'duress' key? If the duress key is given instead of the real key the encrypted data is erased. This would be easy enough to defeat by a suitably motivated investigator, but they'd have to have figured out what was going to happen first...
guy: Hey baby, what's your phone number? girl: It's in the phone book, look it up! guy: But I don't know your name. girl: That's in the phone book too.
I don't need to. I can wire in a monkey brain and use it instead. People who know me might suggest that this has already happened.
medical significance of this, silly aspect of monkey-gaming
The medical uses will be great, but the technology will be funded and advanced by MMORG companies who, finally realizing that their AI sucks, will move on to using monkey brains in jars.
I can practically guarantee I will never be rear-ended by another vehicle, because of how gradually I decelerate to a stop
I was rear-ended about 10 years ago. I was stopped at a major intersection, and had been stopped for several seconds. In that case there was nowhere to go - I did notice the car coming towards me in the rear view mirror, but there was not time to do any sort of check if I wanted to drive forwards to get out of the way.
I can also nearly guarantee I will never be side-swiped.
The only other accident I was in I was stationary at a pedestrian crossing and a car came around the corner and crushed my front guard. I didn't have any time to react in that case, but had I seen the car coming earlier my options would have been to drive forward and risk hitting pedestrians, or reverse into the car behind me.
A drunk driver can swerve suddenly giving you not enough reaction time to avoid the accident. A driver can overtake over a blind hill and hit you head on with no time to do anything. A kangaroo can be unavoidable (I have pulled up to a complete stop before and still had a collision with a kangaroo - they are truly stupid animals, and can do quite a bit of damage to your car with their own inertial mass).
By driving carefully and paying attention you can certainly go some way to reducing the chance of an accident involving another road user, but I think you have less control over it than you think.
So, this is something we need because we are all so lacking in self control that we can't ignore a phone when it rings?
*sigh* No, it's something that you might want because it might make your life a bit easier. In the same way that having a phone at all makes your life a bit easier, or that driving a car makes your life easier, or that having an mp3 player vs a cassette player makes your life a bit easier.
If you don't want one, don't get one, but stop whining about people who can actually see a legitimate use for such a device.
"In my experience, there's no such thing as luck" -Obi Wan
In my experience, there is no such thing as 'the force' either.
Your "someone has to be that statistic" argument is a bit silly. Every time you go for a walk there are numerous ways you could die (fall over, something falls on you from above, get hit by a car, get shot or stabbed by a mugger, etc). Are you going to not do that either just because you "don't want to be that statistic"?
After I posted that I got to thinking along those lines too. I think they might have been using statistics based on 'of all the people who were killed in accidents, 1/5000th of them died in car crashes, and 1/11000000th of them died in plane crashes', so the statistics really didn't help my point, and just confused the issue. Most people spend less time in a plane so even if the 'chance of a given plane trip ending badly' vs 'chance of a given car trip ending badly' were even, the chance of dying in a plane crash is going to be much lower.
What I would need is 'total person-hours spent in planes vs number of deaths' vs 'total person-hours spent in cars vs number of deaths'...
If you're not drunk, or a teenager who just got a license, you're much less likely to be killed in a car accident.... Cars are really a terrible comparison, because YOU control your odds of being killed.
In a car you have some control over the odds. But you do in a plane too. You can choose an airline on the basis that they have a good safety record, and not just on price.
But if you think you have 'control', as opposed to a 'small amount of control' of the odds in a car then you are kidding yourself. Good drivers die on the roads too. You may not be a drunk, a teenager who just got a license, or a truck driver who's been driving for 72 hours straight, but there are plenty of others on the road who do fit that criteria, and that's what you don't have control over.
Sometimes people rationalise things correctly. I've been in 4 car crashes in my life , 2 were my fault, 2 weren't. I'm still here uninjured to write about them. What are the chances I'd still be alive if I'd been involved in 4 plane crashes? Pretty damn close to zero I'd say.
I don't think your use of 'chance' is really correct. But to follow on with your logic... I don't know the numbers in your case, but lets say you've been in a car one million times, and you've been in a plane once. We know you have had 4 car accidents and zero plan accidents. 0.0004% of your car trips have ended in a crash, while 0% of your plane trips have ended in a crash. Based on those statistics, which one would you choose?
The problem is that you neglected to take into account the likelihood of an accident occurring, but rather focused on the outcome of the accident, should it have occurred. Even in the case of TFA nobody was killed - several people were badly injured, but most were uninjured.
Your chances of being involved in an aircraft accident are about 1 in 11 million. On the other hand, your chances of being killed in an automobile accident are 1 in 5000. Statistically, you are at far greater risk driving to the airport than getting on an airplane. However, the perception is that you have more control over your fate when you are in your car than as a passenger traveling on an airplane. Experience shows otherwise, considering that over 50,000 people are killed on the highways every year.
Thanks, I'll pass on that flight... until you get all the bugs worked out of those systems
It's interesting the way people rationalize things isn't it?
Statistically, you are far more likely to die in a car on the way to work than you are in a commercial passenger aircraft. Statistically, the computer system in a commercial passenger aircraft is far less likely to fsck things up than a human pilot (although that's saying nothing about the _size_ of the fsckup, should one occur...)
I drive around 600km a week in my car. A lot of that is spent at 110km/hour on a freeway, and at 100km/hour along some reasonably windy and hilly roads. I often think about the ways that such an activity could end rather badly for me, but it doesn't worry me greatly.
In about a week though I'm going to be getting onto an airplane for the first time in about 28 years, and the thought of it has me a little nervous - far more so than driving a car which is, statistically speaking, far more dangerous.
A car crash here in Australia will often make the news, possibly only locally unless more than a few people lost their lives. A plane crash of any reasonable size will make the news world wide, and will probably continue to do so for weeks after the event. The Quantas Airbus 'mishap' didn't kill anyone, and the majority of the passengers have probably mostly healed whatever injuries they did sustain by now, and yet here in Australia the incident still makes the news daily. The logical part of your brain should tell you that that is a comforting thing - it's so unusual that it is still newsworthy a week later. The less logical parts of your brain though are constantly reminded that while safe, air travel is not 100% safe.
For me I think the difference is the time I will have to contemplate things should something go wrong. In a car, the time between the realization of error (mine or someone elses) and things ending badly is going to be measured in seconds. In an airplane, the time between when I realize that things are not as they should be and the time when I won't be thinking anymore could be measured in minutes. That is a pretty chilling thought for me...
what's to stop me from turning it off AS THE DRIVER also?
That's a bit of an uninformed conclusion. Just because you can imagine a bunch of cases where such a feature is not a good idea, doesn't mean that there aren't cases where it would solve a lot of problems. If your job involved lots of short drives between destinations then it could be really useful. As soon as you start moving your phone won't interrupt you, as soon as you stop it lets you know about the calls you missed, and in the meantime it let the people trying to contact you know what's going on.
If you took your blinkers off you might realize that this is a feature that will be useful for some people, who will purchase it, and not so much for others, who won't purchase it. It's not a hard thing to get your hear around if you try. Nobodies going to purchase it and then try and figure out a way of defeating it.
If Slashdot was a crowded room, and someone were to come into the room and ask "Who owns the red car parked out the front", the answer "oh yeah, that's mine" would be lost amongst the noise of everyone else replying "It's not mine. I can't imagine why you'd think it was mine. How dare you suggest that I left a red car parked out the front".
I've been involved in two open source projects over the last 12 months and have received (tentative) employment offers as a result of both of them. A decent contribution to a large project shows that you can do the job, can work well with others, and can be motivated to do things, so even if people don't come looking for you, it still helps a lot, and keeps your experience current.
If you do participate in OSS projects via public mailing lists, remember that most of the related mailing lists are publicly archived and your name will show up in a google search as a result of this, particularly if you state "I have been heavily involved in project xyz" on your resume and they go and google using your name and that project as keywords. So be nice to others online:)
So... what? Now we are going to have 'Miniature cloning is stealing' blurbs on packaging for small-but-expensive items? 'When you cloning this miniature, you are cloning COMMUNISM'.
This is probably the most tasteless thought that has ever popped into my head upon reading a slashdot article, but my first thought was an ED-209 style robot that would go around blowing womens breasts off. Sure, it's intention would be to do biopsies and only remove cancerous cells, but it would reason that if breasts were totally destroyed then they couldn't get cancer in the first place, and ED-209 was never the smartest of robots...
I'm wrong of course... DRM is a technical solution to a social problem, which never works.
#1. You could build something into the device holding the data that ensures that it self destructs after a certain time
#2. You could program something into the device that ensured that all copies taken were known.
#3. You could use cryptography to ensure that all devices that connected to it via #2 were certified to comply with whatever specification ensured the deletion of the data
but, #1 is impossible, #2 is impossible, and #3 is impossible. So 'no' is the answer to your question.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think it's hilarious that you don't seem able to even spell democracy any better than you understand it. If you don't care about the election then stfu about the outcome of it.
If you want to vote online then find a candidate who feels the same way about it as you and vote for them. Or run in the election yourself.
Whatever you do though, don't whine on slashdot about it!
Slashdot Mirror
People keep saying that about the incoherent ramblings of Nostrodamus too... ;)
Your data should be safer on a properly maintained cloud than it is on your own hardware. I think in this case though, while Yahoo did get income from people using it, the people who's data they were storing would not have any recourse should their data get lost. I haven't read the EULA, but I think it's safe to say that it has something in it along the lines of "If we screw up and lose all your data you can assured that the sympathy you receive from us will be of the highest quality".
On the other hand, a cloud operator would be taking your money directly and would have a certain SLA to meet.
That being said, if a cloud did ever fail in Yahoo-like spectacular fashion, I'm sure that the senior staff would have an infallible backup plan, presumably along the lines of a tunnel direct to a country offering safe harbour.
While involving Microsoft, my first was a little different... "Microsoft has sabotaged Yahoo to lower their value before buying them out."
Most of the time the problem is not 'the cloud' itself, but reachability. The cloud can have all the 9's it wants, but (at least for some parts of the world) the sort of SLA's with enough 9's to match the uptime of the cloud cost more $$$ than hosting the solution on site.
And no matter what SLA's you have with your ISP, a backhoe operator can take you out for hours, or even days. You can back it up with wireless for email and stuff but I don't believe that wireless can cope with the sort of bandwidth requirements of a hosted solution like Google Apps, especially if said backhoe operator takes out all internet access in a local area, and _everyone_ switches over to their wireless backup.
Still... at least you can leave the office for the day and go bowling :)
At least we'll have something worth exporting. I'm sure lots of other countries will be only too happy to buy our blacklists which we have meticulously researched.
except... we'll probably just be importing them from somewhere else...
That goes against every UK and US cop show I've ever watched. I thought you were always allowed to insist on legal representation before answering any questions.
Surely you'd have to be allowed to discuss with a lawyer whether the cops finding the kid you have tied up in the basement of a secret location is going to land you a worse sentence than not handing over the encryption keys...
Is there a system which will allow the use of a 'duress' key? If the duress key is given instead of the real key the encrypted data is erased. This would be easy enough to defeat by a suitably motivated investigator, but they'd have to have figured out what was going to happen first...
Reminds me of this failed pick-up scenario:
guy: Hey baby, what's your phone number?
girl: It's in the phone book, look it up!
guy: But I don't know your name.
girl: That's in the phone book too.
I don't need to. I can wire in a monkey brain and use it instead. People who know me might suggest that this has already happened.
The medical uses will be great, but the technology will be funded and advanced by MMORG companies who, finally realizing that their AI sucks, will move on to using monkey brains in jars.
I was rear-ended about 10 years ago. I was stopped at a major intersection, and had been stopped for several seconds. In that case there was nowhere to go - I did notice the car coming towards me in the rear view mirror, but there was not time to do any sort of check if I wanted to drive forwards to get out of the way.
The only other accident I was in I was stationary at a pedestrian crossing and a car came around the corner and crushed my front guard. I didn't have any time to react in that case, but had I seen the car coming earlier my options would have been to drive forward and risk hitting pedestrians, or reverse into the car behind me.
A drunk driver can swerve suddenly giving you not enough reaction time to avoid the accident. A driver can overtake over a blind hill and hit you head on with no time to do anything. A kangaroo can be unavoidable (I have pulled up to a complete stop before and still had a collision with a kangaroo - they are truly stupid animals, and can do quite a bit of damage to your car with their own inertial mass).
By driving carefully and paying attention you can certainly go some way to reducing the chance of an accident involving another road user, but I think you have less control over it than you think.
*sigh* No, it's something that you might want because it might make your life a bit easier. In the same way that having a phone at all makes your life a bit easier, or that driving a car makes your life easier, or that having an mp3 player vs a cassette player makes your life a bit easier.
If you don't want one, don't get one, but stop whining about people who can actually see a legitimate use for such a device.
In my experience, there is no such thing as 'the force' either.
Your "someone has to be that statistic" argument is a bit silly. Every time you go for a walk there are numerous ways you could die (fall over, something falls on you from above, get hit by a car, get shot or stabbed by a mugger, etc). Are you going to not do that either just because you "don't want to be that statistic"?
After I posted that I got to thinking along those lines too. I think they might have been using statistics based on 'of all the people who were killed in accidents, 1/5000th of them died in car crashes, and 1/11000000th of them died in plane crashes', so the statistics really didn't help my point, and just confused the issue. Most people spend less time in a plane so even if the 'chance of a given plane trip ending badly' vs 'chance of a given car trip ending badly' were even, the chance of dying in a plane crash is going to be much lower.
What I would need is 'total person-hours spent in planes vs number of deaths' vs 'total person-hours spent in cars vs number of deaths'...
In a car you have some control over the odds. But you do in a plane too. You can choose an airline on the basis that they have a good safety record, and not just on price.
But if you think you have 'control', as opposed to a 'small amount of control' of the odds in a car then you are kidding yourself. Good drivers die on the roads too. You may not be a drunk, a teenager who just got a license, or a truck driver who's been driving for 72 hours straight, but there are plenty of others on the road who do fit that criteria, and that's what you don't have control over.
I don't think your use of 'chance' is really correct. But to follow on with your logic... I don't know the numbers in your case, but lets say you've been in a car one million times, and you've been in a plane once. We know you have had 4 car accidents and zero plan accidents. 0.0004% of your car trips have ended in a crash, while 0% of your plane trips have ended in a crash. Based on those statistics, which one would you choose?
The problem is that you neglected to take into account the likelihood of an accident occurring, but rather focused on the outcome of the accident, should it have occurred. Even in the case of TFA nobody was killed - several people were badly injured, but most were uninjured.
According to this site:
Remember to do that every time you get in the car do you? Good for you if you do, but I tend to forget.
It's interesting the way people rationalize things isn't it?
Statistically, you are far more likely to die in a car on the way to work than you are in a commercial passenger aircraft. Statistically, the computer system in a commercial passenger aircraft is far less likely to fsck things up than a human pilot (although that's saying nothing about the _size_ of the fsckup, should one occur...)
I drive around 600km a week in my car. A lot of that is spent at 110km/hour on a freeway, and at 100km/hour along some reasonably windy and hilly roads. I often think about the ways that such an activity could end rather badly for me, but it doesn't worry me greatly.
In about a week though I'm going to be getting onto an airplane for the first time in about 28 years, and the thought of it has me a little nervous - far more so than driving a car which is, statistically speaking, far more dangerous.
A car crash here in Australia will often make the news, possibly only locally unless more than a few people lost their lives. A plane crash of any reasonable size will make the news world wide, and will probably continue to do so for weeks after the event. The Quantas Airbus 'mishap' didn't kill anyone, and the majority of the passengers have probably mostly healed whatever injuries they did sustain by now, and yet here in Australia the incident still makes the news daily. The logical part of your brain should tell you that that is a comforting thing - it's so unusual that it is still newsworthy a week later. The less logical parts of your brain though are constantly reminded that while safe, air travel is not 100% safe.
For me I think the difference is the time I will have to contemplate things should something go wrong. In a car, the time between the realization of error (mine or someone elses) and things ending badly is going to be measured in seconds. In an airplane, the time between when I realize that things are not as they should be and the time when I won't be thinking anymore could be measured in minutes. That is a pretty chilling thought for me...
That's a bit of an uninformed conclusion. Just because you can imagine a bunch of cases where such a feature is not a good idea, doesn't mean that there aren't cases where it would solve a lot of problems. If your job involved lots of short drives between destinations then it could be really useful. As soon as you start moving your phone won't interrupt you, as soon as you stop it lets you know about the calls you missed, and in the meantime it let the people trying to contact you know what's going on.
If you took your blinkers off you might realize that this is a feature that will be useful for some people, who will purchase it, and not so much for others, who won't purchase it. It's not a hard thing to get your hear around if you try. Nobodies going to purchase it and then try and figure out a way of defeating it.
If Slashdot was a crowded room, and someone were to come into the room and ask "Who owns the red car parked out the front", the answer "oh yeah, that's mine" would be lost amongst the noise of everyone else replying "It's not mine. I can't imagine why you'd think it was mine. How dare you suggest that I left a red car parked out the front".
I've been involved in two open source projects over the last 12 months and have received (tentative) employment offers as a result of both of them. A decent contribution to a large project shows that you can do the job, can work well with others, and can be motivated to do things, so even if people don't come looking for you, it still helps a lot, and keeps your experience current.
If you do participate in OSS projects via public mailing lists, remember that most of the related mailing lists are publicly archived and your name will show up in a google search as a result of this, particularly if you state "I have been heavily involved in project xyz" on your resume and they go and google using your name and that project as keywords. So be nice to others online :)
So... what? Now we are going to have 'Miniature cloning is stealing' blurbs on packaging for small-but-expensive items? 'When you cloning this miniature, you are cloning COMMUNISM'.
Interesting times ahead...
This is probably the most tasteless thought that has ever popped into my head upon reading a slashdot article, but my first thought was an ED-209 style robot that would go around blowing womens breasts off. Sure, it's intention would be to do biopsies and only remove cancerous cells, but it would reason that if breasts were totally destroyed then they couldn't get cancer in the first place, and ED-209 was never the smartest of robots...
I know!!! I know!!! What is DRM?
I'm wrong of course... DRM is a technical solution to a social problem, which never works.
#1. You could build something into the device holding the data that ensures that it self destructs after a certain time
#2. You could program something into the device that ensured that all copies taken were known.
#3. You could use cryptography to ensure that all devices that connected to it via #2 were certified to comply with whatever specification ensured the deletion of the data
but, #1 is impossible, #2 is impossible, and #3 is impossible. So 'no' is the answer to your question.
He got the memo, he just forgot.
whatcouldpossiblygowrong
I think it's hilarious that you don't seem able to even spell democracy any better than you understand it. If you don't care about the election then stfu about the outcome of it.
If you want to vote online then find a candidate who feels the same way about it as you and vote for them. Or run in the election yourself.
Whatever you do though, don't whine on slashdot about it!