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You obviously didn't get my point. Instead you boil over into useless ramblings about murderous wives, Mary Poppins and bank details.
Listen carefully. If I want to talk to myself from one computer that I control to another computer that I control, why would I NOT use a self-signed certificate? I don't have to pay for it, I don't have to renew it and its signed by ME the most trustworthy person I know (IMHO).
Now extend that concept out to a company where you have INTERNAL servers that only your employees connect to. You might ask, why bother with encryption if its all internal. Answer: because I mean internal loosely, parts of the company may be separated geographically and therefore not all behind a single firewall. Or those servers are development servers which should mimic the connections of the production servers.
There's little to no reason to go out to a third party "trusted" certifier just so that your company/employees can talk to itself/themselves. So you use self-signed certificates. And then you convince everyone in your company to use Firefox because IE is a massive security hole. Up to this point you've done everything right and what do you get? Non-techy employees that freak out and cannot understand what to do when they see the Firefox self-signed cert page.
Obviously if your bank is using a self-signed certificate, someone needs to be fired. But for legitimate uses of self-signed certs (AND THERE ARE LEGITIMATE USES), Firefox's approach is very difficult for non-tech users to deal with.
Sorry, but your doctor analogy just isn't valid. There are very legitimate reasons for using self-signed certificates. It's more akin to a husband letting his wife give him his daily insulin injection because he trusts her and she doesn't need to be a doctor. Or something.
For instance, my company uses lots of self-signed certificates for internal webservers that are not accessible outside our network. Several of our less technical employees have upgraded to Firefox 3 (mostly from peer pressure) and then been thoroughly confused by the very scary warning
I have to say I'm impressed, and that's just with the parts I actually understood. But several people have brought up the Hollywood version of leak detection by introducing something (balloons, Dr. Pepper, smoke, etc) into the air that would then be pulled via air currents to the hole. In one particularly dramatic movie, the liquid then forms a giant icy soda spike sticking out of the spacecraft so that it could be identify from outside and patched.
Since it was a movie I almost have to assume it wouldn't work but why is that? Is the suction so minimal that normal internal turbulence would disrupt any flow of air toward the leak that might otherwise draw the indicator?
I find it very interesting that there is a person purporting (and I pretty much believe him) to be within China, more or less refuting most of the crap that's floating around in this discussion and noone else is paying attention to him. Am I missing something? Is this a well-known Slashdot personality pretending to be from China that I've somehow not noticed in the last 7 years or do most of the current posters just like to hear themselves talk...
I agree whole heartedly. Most legitimate researchers in any field that can be considered a subset of traditional AI do not and would not ever refer to themselves as AI researchers. They don't talk about AI in the generic, vague terms that the general public does. Most of us have come to realize that trying to pass the Turing Test at this point in the game is paramount to trying to get a dinosaur to lay a chicken egg. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying its impossible, just that early AI research was way overzealous and today the research focuses on small subdomains in an effort to incrementally build up a meaningful baseline of components that could eventually go into a bot that could pass the Turing Test. The difference now is that the Turing Test (or just AI in general) is not the focus as we all have come to recognize that until you lay some bricks, you're not going to have a roof over your head. NLP research has come a long way and these bots don't look like they make use of any of it.
Overgeneralizations are mostly static too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophet lists at least 7 major (current) religions or belief systems (excluding cults) that believe in modern-day or future prophets. To the followers of these religions, the words of their prophets are every bit as prophetical and canonical as are the standard scriptural works: Bible/Koran/Talmud/etc. You can't judge all world religions by mainstream, American, Bible-thumping, "I have exorcised the demons!", Sunday-worshipping, Monday-cursing, tunnel-vision evangelical Christians. And several of those religions with modern-day/future prophets believe in some form of a creation (although not necessarily the set of doctrines you refer to when you use creationism as derogatory). I grew up in the South where the most racist people I ever met were black. Since then I find that some of the most bigoted are atheists.
He now claims to have only about 50K pixels remaining but if you try to find them you'll be hard pressed (except near the bottom where its a little more obvious). Apparently he let people pick exactly where they wanted their signs even if it meant wasting space, but I don't think he's gonna be able to pick up that last $50K unless he does some rearranging.
You can't ask people to cite sources on slashdot, you might inadvertently cause them to reply with a link to their own slashdot posting and then some sorry fool will spend the next 47 hours in an infinite loop following citation to source to citation to source to citation to source to... until his brain overflows or he slips into an inescapable coma waiting for an actual answer.
The problem with the kinds of blogs that are being criticised here is that they amount to nothing more nor less than the pointless, trivial griping that usually goes on in bars or on front porches because Person A got pissed off about what Company X did. Then, since you always want to side with your friend and not Company X, everyone in the bar or on the porch or at the bus stop says, "Yeah, you know what happened to my cousin/brother/nephew/uncle/3rd great grandma/neighbor/etc,...". Everyone basically understands that its just mob bashing and doesn't actually have anything against X. A week later they're sitting with friends from work at lunch and someone starts talking about how great Company X is and they chime in. It's pointless, meaningless, and normally never affects anyone. Now all of the sudden someone puts the same silly bashing up on a new, kewl and trendy kind of website called a "blog" and everyone suddenly pays attention to it. It's as intelligent as using/. comments to gauge public perception of Microsoft. At some point, we all learn to ignore people who spend all their time complaining. Hopefully, the same will happen in the world of blogs. And quickly.
A friend of mine in college noticed that one of our professors had accidentally put up all our grades along with our SSNs on a publicly accessible website. He copied that information and put it on his own personal website in an attempt to get the professor in trouble for violating the schools policy on disclosing SSNs (couldn't happen now anyway with stricter laws on SSNs as unique identifiers). The professor took down the webpage and my friend was kicked out of school and not allowed to reapply for 4 years. The professor still works there and no action was taken against him.
Now hold on. I wasn't pushing third party hacks like Gaim and Trillian (in fact, I even said that my suggestion would NOT benefit them). I was saying that the companies themselves should support interconnectivity in the same transparent way that cellphone and landline companies do. I don't care what underlying propietary nonsense they want to use, I just don't want to have to sign up with a different service just because someone I meet only uses a service I don't use (I have an MSN account for one person and one person only). I certainly prefer the current cellphone system over one where I'd have to buy a new phone just to talk to someone who used a different service from me.
My point then was that if I could use the same client to IM someone on the MSN or ICQ or Jabber or Google or ____ network then I would decide which client I wanted. Then, when everybody stopped using client X (because presumably it sucked), company X would say "Maybe we should make a better client" and so now you have good competition existing as it should (no monopolies) but the users get the service that they want and users would only use a "free loader" client because it was better than the ones provided by these companies. If they want me to use their client so that I can see their advertisements or whatever, they had better make sure its the best one out there, otherwise I'll use someone elses. As it stands right now, I have to either use AIM or a third party client to talk to anyone who only has an AIM account. Again, Nextel to Nextel only.
And I would point out that there's another good analogy to cellphones that I hadn't thought of, but since you brought up the free vs paid-for issue, here goes. Several cell companies (or at least Verizon and probably others) allow you to call anyone on their network completely for free. Now I know it wasn't always that way and IM is already free, but I could imagine the various chat companies working out a deal where you can use the AIM client for free with other AIM users but pay a premium (be it per chat or monthly or whatever) to message users on a different network. Now, I know that this would actually make the usage of GAIM/Trillian/etc go up but now you're actually taking money from them and so a lot of people would willling pay (assuming the prices were cheap). It's just like with MP3's. Lots of people can and still do download them illegally but iTunes/etc are hugely popular and people pay money to do what they could just as easily do for free because they want to follow the law.
Of course then all the IM companies get together and form the CIAA and sue hundreds of 14-year old girls for using Trillian, but someone's always going to be trying to sue 14-year old girls so why fight it.
Instead of these 3 expensive monopoly services, we should instead switch to one single service that we know is far more competitive than three monopolies.
You're heading towards making a good point but it all falls apart when you start talking about cars and TVs.
We should make every car part interoperable between manufacturers, and make every TV the same size so that everyone sees the same picture. I'm sure it won't stifle development.
It doesn't matter if your car and my car are interoperable because our cars never have to communicate between each other (yet). Neither of us would benefit in anyway if it were possible for us to swap belts or hoses or mufflers or whatever.
But it does not matter when it comes to a communication platform. What if you couldn't call someone because they used AT&T and you used Sprint? What if your Nextel cellphone could only connect to other Nextel cellphones? You would clearly think that it was ridiculous. An earlier reply to your comment was on the right track about ISPs and email. But what if you couldn't email him because you could only email within your own ISP? What if you could only visit websites hosted by your ISP? What would be the point? The internet wouldn't never have developed under these kind of preposterous circumstances. But those are a much better analogy for the IM world.
Then you throw in GAIM, Trillian, and whoever else that tries to establish general connectivity and the "monopolies" fight to keep them out. Equivalent to a third party company setting up one set of phone lines to AT&T and one set to Sprint and then when you (on you're AT&T phone) want to call someone on a Sprint phone you call the third party first and they make the connection for you. Or even better, you personally get both kinds of phones and both kinds of phonelines and then have the third party come to your house and wire up a hacked connection between them. Then in the middle of the night, someone from Sprint sneaks up to your house and cuts the wires. Or else they modulate their phone signal with propietary garbage that only they know how to filter out so you still have the connection but it's useless.
Would you still fight against a citizen's revolt in a circumstance like that?
I will point out however, that what I first quoted from you above is still an important comment. Notice that in all my silly analogies I never said that Sprint and AT&T should merge (with all the other telcos) and become one gigantic conglomerate. Instead, they should still all exist (competition is good), they just all need to recognize that they would all benefit if they established general connectivity (well, all minus Trillian, etc unless you just prefer their interface).
Right now, people primarily choose to use existing IM services solely because their friends do. If they all interoperated, then we would choose them based on their quality of service (just as we ideally do with cellphones, etc). And then hopefully that quality of service would finally start to improve.
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Warning: shameless plug. You can fix it with this style: http://userstyles.org/styles/11351 Usable with firefox and either Stylish or Greasemonkey plugins
Listen carefully. If I want to talk to myself from one computer that I control to another computer that I control, why would I NOT use a self-signed certificate? I don't have to pay for it, I don't have to renew it and its signed by ME the most trustworthy person I know (IMHO).
Now extend that concept out to a company where you have INTERNAL servers that only your employees connect to. You might ask, why bother with encryption if its all internal. Answer: because I mean internal loosely, parts of the company may be separated geographically and therefore not all behind a single firewall. Or those servers are development servers which should mimic the connections of the production servers.
There's little to no reason to go out to a third party "trusted" certifier just so that your company/employees can talk to itself/themselves. So you use self-signed certificates. And then you convince everyone in your company to use Firefox because IE is a massive security hole. Up to this point you've done everything right and what do you get? Non-techy employees that freak out and cannot understand what to do when they see the Firefox self-signed cert page.
Obviously if your bank is using a self-signed certificate, someone needs to be fired. But for legitimate uses of self-signed certs (AND THERE ARE LEGITIMATE USES), Firefox's approach is very difficult for non-tech users to deal with.
Sorry, but your doctor analogy just isn't valid. There are very legitimate reasons for using self-signed certificates. It's more akin to a husband letting his wife give him his daily insulin injection because he trusts her and she doesn't need to be a doctor. Or something. For instance, my company uses lots of self-signed certificates for internal webservers that are not accessible outside our network. Several of our less technical employees have upgraded to Firefox 3 (mostly from peer pressure) and then been thoroughly confused by the very scary warning
I have to say I'm impressed, and that's just with the parts I actually understood. But several people have brought up the Hollywood version of leak detection by introducing something (balloons, Dr. Pepper, smoke, etc) into the air that would then be pulled via air currents to the hole. In one particularly dramatic movie, the liquid then forms a giant icy soda spike sticking out of the spacecraft so that it could be identify from outside and patched.
Since it was a movie I almost have to assume it wouldn't work but why is that? Is the suction so minimal that normal internal turbulence would disrupt any flow of air toward the leak that might otherwise draw the indicator?
MY misread:
Hot Jupiters May Indicate Hospital Plans
I find it very interesting that there is a person purporting (and I pretty much believe him) to be within China, more or less refuting most of the crap that's floating around in this discussion and noone else is paying attention to him. Am I missing something? Is this a well-known Slashdot personality pretending to be from China that I've somehow not noticed in the last 7 years or do most of the current posters just like to hear themselves talk...
I agree whole heartedly. Most legitimate researchers in any field that can be considered a subset of traditional AI do not and would not ever refer to themselves as AI researchers. They don't talk about AI in the generic, vague terms that the general public does. Most of us have come to realize that trying to pass the Turing Test at this point in the game is paramount to trying to get a dinosaur to lay a chicken egg. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying its impossible, just that early AI research was way overzealous and today the research focuses on small subdomains in an effort to incrementally build up a meaningful baseline of components that could eventually go into a bot that could pass the Turing Test. The difference now is that the Turing Test (or just AI in general) is not the focus as we all have come to recognize that until you lay some bricks, you're not going to have a roof over your head. NLP research has come a long way and these bots don't look like they make use of any of it.
Overgeneralizations are mostly static too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophet lists at least 7 major (current) religions or belief systems (excluding cults) that believe in modern-day or future prophets. To the followers of these religions, the words of their prophets are every bit as prophetical and canonical as are the standard scriptural works: Bible/Koran/Talmud/etc. You can't judge all world religions by mainstream, American, Bible-thumping, "I have exorcised the demons!", Sunday-worshipping, Monday-cursing, tunnel-vision evangelical Christians. And several of those religions with modern-day/future prophets believe in some form of a creation (although not necessarily the set of doctrines you refer to when you use creationism as derogatory). I grew up in the South where the most racist people I ever met were black. Since then I find that some of the most bigoted are atheists.
He now claims to have only about 50K pixels remaining but if you try to find them you'll be hard pressed (except near the bottom where its a little more obvious). Apparently he let people pick exactly where they wanted their signs even if it meant wasting space, but I don't think he's gonna be able to pick up that last $50K unless he does some rearranging.
You can't ask people to cite sources on slashdot, you might inadvertently cause them to reply with a link to their own slashdot posting and then some sorry fool will spend the next 47 hours in an infinite loop following citation to source to citation to source to citation to source to ... until his brain overflows or he slips into an inescapable coma waiting for an actual answer.
The problem with the kinds of blogs that are being criticised here is that they amount to nothing more nor less than the pointless, trivial griping that usually goes on in bars or on front porches because Person A got pissed off about what Company X did. Then, since you always want to side with your friend and not Company X, everyone in the bar or on the porch or at the bus stop says, "Yeah, you know what happened to my cousin/brother/nephew/uncle/3rd great grandma/neighbor/etc, ...". Everyone basically understands that its just mob bashing and doesn't actually have anything against X. A week later they're sitting with friends from work at lunch and someone starts talking about how great Company X is and they chime in. It's pointless, meaningless, and normally never affects anyone. Now all of the sudden someone puts the same silly bashing up on a new, kewl and trendy kind of website called a "blog" and everyone suddenly pays attention to it. It's as intelligent as using /. comments to gauge public perception of Microsoft. At some point, we all learn to ignore people who spend all their time complaining. Hopefully, the same will happen in the world of blogs. And quickly.
A friend of mine in college noticed that one of our professors had accidentally put up all our grades along with our SSNs on a publicly accessible website. He copied that information and put it on his own personal website in an attempt to get the professor in trouble for violating the schools policy on disclosing SSNs (couldn't happen now anyway with stricter laws on SSNs as unique identifiers). The professor took down the webpage and my friend was kicked out of school and not allowed to reapply for 4 years. The professor still works there and no action was taken against him.
Now hold on. I wasn't pushing third party hacks like Gaim and Trillian (in fact, I even said that my suggestion would NOT benefit them). I was saying that the companies themselves should support interconnectivity in the same transparent way that cellphone and landline companies do. I don't care what underlying propietary nonsense they want to use, I just don't want to have to sign up with a different service just because someone I meet only uses a service I don't use (I have an MSN account for one person and one person only). I certainly prefer the current cellphone system over one where I'd have to buy a new phone just to talk to someone who used a different service from me.
My point then was that if I could use the same client to IM someone on the MSN or ICQ or Jabber or Google or ____ network then I would decide which client I wanted. Then, when everybody stopped using client X (because presumably it sucked), company X would say "Maybe we should make a better client" and so now you have good competition existing as it should (no monopolies) but the users get the service that they want and users would only use a "free loader" client because it was better than the ones provided by these companies. If they want me to use their client so that I can see their advertisements or whatever, they had better make sure its the best one out there, otherwise I'll use someone elses. As it stands right now, I have to either use AIM or a third party client to talk to anyone who only has an AIM account. Again, Nextel to Nextel only.
And I would point out that there's another good analogy to cellphones that I hadn't thought of, but since you brought up the free vs paid-for issue, here goes. Several cell companies (or at least Verizon and probably others) allow you to call anyone on their network completely for free. Now I know it wasn't always that way and IM is already free, but I could imagine the various chat companies working out a deal where you can use the AIM client for free with other AIM users but pay a premium (be it per chat or monthly or whatever) to message users on a different network. Now, I know that this would actually make the usage of GAIM/Trillian/etc go up but now you're actually taking money from them and so a lot of people would willling pay (assuming the prices were cheap). It's just like with MP3's. Lots of people can and still do download them illegally but iTunes/etc are hugely popular and people pay money to do what they could just as easily do for free because they want to follow the law.
Of course then all the IM companies get together and form the CIAA and sue hundreds of 14-year old girls for using Trillian, but someone's always going to be trying to sue 14-year old girls so why fight it.
You're heading towards making a good point but it all falls apart when you start talking about cars and TVs.
It doesn't matter if your car and my car are interoperable because our cars never have to communicate between each other (yet). Neither of us would benefit in anyway if it were possible for us to swap belts or hoses or mufflers or whatever.
But it does not matter when it comes to a communication platform. What if you couldn't call someone because they used AT&T and you used Sprint? What if your Nextel cellphone could only connect to other Nextel cellphones? You would clearly think that it was ridiculous. An earlier reply to your comment was on the right track about ISPs and email. But what if you couldn't email him because you could only email within your own ISP? What if you could only visit websites hosted by your ISP? What would be the point? The internet wouldn't never have developed under these kind of preposterous circumstances. But those are a much better analogy for the IM world.
Then you throw in GAIM, Trillian, and whoever else that tries to establish general connectivity and the "monopolies" fight to keep them out. Equivalent to a third party company setting up one set of phone lines to AT&T and one set to Sprint and then when you (on you're AT&T phone) want to call someone on a Sprint phone you call the third party first and they make the connection for you. Or even better, you personally get both kinds of phones and both kinds of phonelines and then have the third party come to your house and wire up a hacked connection between them. Then in the middle of the night, someone from Sprint sneaks up to your house and cuts the wires. Or else they modulate their phone signal with propietary garbage that only they know how to filter out so you still have the connection but it's useless.
Would you still fight against a citizen's revolt in a circumstance like that?
I will point out however, that what I first quoted from you above is still an important comment. Notice that in all my silly analogies I never said that Sprint and AT&T should merge (with all the other telcos) and become one gigantic conglomerate. Instead, they should still all exist (competition is good), they just all need to recognize that they would all benefit if they established general connectivity (well, all minus Trillian, etc unless you just prefer their interface).
Right now, people primarily choose to use existing IM services solely because their friends do. If they all interoperated, then we would choose them based on their quality of service (just as we ideally do with cellphones, etc). And then hopefully that quality of service would finally start to improve.