Psychologist's statistical study suggesting that psychologists have possible psychological issues with sharing their psychological studies... perhaps this warrants a further psychological study of said psychologists?
"A little over a month ago, I assumed the position of programmer and sole IT personnel at a thriving e-commerce company."
I'm sorry, repeat that again?
"A little over a month ago, I assumed the position of programmer and sole IT personnel at a thriving e-commerce company"
No offense, but you should leave NOW! A "thriving e-commerce company" with only one person in IT? Really? You are working for a Mickey Mouse operation. It's most likely run by sales, and sales doesn't give a damn what you do or how you do it or the problems caused for you. Those band aids? Sales requested each and every one of them! Leave now. Leave fast!
I think these lock in deals are going to fade away. Google is most happy when users have a choice, much like they get when Chrome is first installed. The reason is that most people given a choice will choose Google. I think the money Google saves not helping Firefox is worth any potential lost business to Bing even if Firefox makes them default. Of course, this will only alienate more Firefox users.
I'm not saying that what you say is impossible, but it is not very feasible unless you have a very special setup which few companies actually have. In most cases, someone ultimately has the keys to the kingdom. The best most can do is restrict this to as few as possible.
Encrypted DB's won't stop a DBA. The reason is that if you fire an employee, someone has to revoke keys and assign new ones. Someone with the authority to revoke and assign keys can view anything they want, anytime they want.
The only method that is possible is where 2 or more people are needed to use their key to access the information. If you have 3 security IT people, you need to create a situation where at least 2 are needed to unlock something.
And let's not overlook the fact that such systems are not usually set up and audited by a 3rd party.
It's not that they are doing it wrong, it's that without a 3rd party setting up the system you can't have that kind of security at all. The best setup would even require that a 3rd party become the key authority, yet have no direct access to company data whatsoever, and only hand over keys directly to the personnel they are assigned to.
Still, does this stop a determined administrator who disabled AV and installs a key logger on a workstation? No. Granted, that's probably criminal, and at least the 3rd party + dual key authentication system stops casual data breaches.
Most businesses don't have a budget for such things. They take the view, and I'm inclined to agree, that if you don't trust staff who have high level access, you shouldn't have hired them in the first place. As someone who people bring in personal laptops in to fix on occasion, most users are aware that I can see everything on their machine. It's not that I can look that worries them, but that I'll keep my mouth shut if I do happen to see something. I was told in no uncertain terms recently, that a laptop was brimming with porn. But, they trusted that I would not be sending out a company memo entitled, "Looky what I found on X's laptop!"
Businesses often feel the same way. Casual breaches do happen as part of authorized work. For instance, if a payroll file becomes corrupted, I'd have to look at the file. They just want you to shut up about what you see and/or forget what you saw. That's what they mean by trusted. Like any trusted friend, it's not about what secrets you know, but what secrets you can be relied upon to keep.
In a previous post, people were saying that mixing biology and computer science was a stupid idea, here. However, this clearly shows that is much needed, except that in this case, the computer geeks can help out the biology nerds.
No. This doesn't modify contracts. But in the US, most hourly paid jobs are required by law to pay 1.5 x rate of pay for work over 40 hours in a single week. This would remove that requirement for some workers.
What that means is that employers are no obligated to pay "time and a half" over 40 hours if they don't want to. They would have to under existing contracts, but they could refuse to include this requirement under new contracts.
However, because overtime pay is so standardized, there is most likely many existing contracts that don't include its own provisions. Union contracts do, simply because they have no trust in labor law. But many non-union contracts were originally negotiated with the impression that mandatory overtime pay was simply an unchanging fact of US labor law.
And if the law changes, those workers could immediately lose overtime benefits.
This means less tax revenue but not through any kind of tax cut. It should start a firestorm the moment someone asks how the lost tax revenue will be "paid for", meaning what program will be cut.
This is a lose-lose for everyone. Workers lose money, government loses money, and businesses that will find negotiating with IT unions much harder than negotiating one on one.
It's not just lack of rationale, it's anti-rationale because it goes against everyone's interests in the end.
Yeah, good luck to them getting anyone one to work on Senator's computers ever again. Email, internet, and computers frequently have problems. Nobody has to crash them... we just don't have to fix them once they do. A day without IT can be a real bitch, just like some Senators.
"Ah, gee, Senator. My shift ended at 5pm and I don't do overtime. Call back tomorrow between 8 and 5pm."
I'd have found a brave, attractive woman to just show her tits at the meeting and say, "There you go, you've all seen tits. Now let's move on and get some free internet."
Lets not forget that it was approved by a slashdot editor as well. This is yet another of many reasons why I don't bother logging in anymore.
Just an idea, but comments are the property of the submitter, and the host is not responsible, at least in most countries. Possibly this system arose to protect Slashdot from copyright lawsuits from the stories it posts the way that Google News was attacked.
...when researchers fed unaltered pictures of Michael Jackson into the system. The system determined that not only were the later pictures manipulated, but that there was only a 0.01% probability that they were even based on the original.
"Pfizer is employing unprecedented tactics to hold onto as many Lipitor prescriptions as it can with an aggressive marketing plan and forging deals with insurers, pharmacy benefit managers and patients to meet or beat the price of its generic replacements because even at the lower price, Pfizer has a huge profit margin because of the relatively low cost of materials for Lipitor."
Oh, the humanity! They're going to make a life saving drug cheaper than even generics! How dare they! And they even plan to keep making a profit while doing it!
My ass. you grant a monopoly to someone. That someone gets big on that monopoly.
Well, yeah? You think they spend billions making drugs so that a company who spent nothing can start churning it out a week later? Of course it's a monopoly! That's the point. But it's a temporary one.
This story isn't an example of why patents are bad. This just shows what happens under ANY patent system, and that its a good thing. We can argue the length of patents or what can be patented, but the idea of a patent itself is pretty much common sense. If you truly invent something, you get the right to own it for a certain period of time. You can charge what you want, sell it how you want, license it if you want, or do nothing with it at all if you so choose.
This simply shows that once that time runs out, you only have the advantage of the business you previously created around that patent. Prices are naturally going to fall because you now have competition. There is a reward for being the inventor, and there is a reward for letting the patent expire. That's a great setup, if you ask me. Sure, that means cutting edge drugs are expensive. But so are cutting edge phones, computers, cars, houses, etc. That's the way life works on this planet. If you do away with the systems that make the cutting edge expensive, you do away with the cutting edge almost all together. Then, you are going back to the days where inventors and artists needed rich, private benefactors who mostly wanted to keep that work private.
This story is not the evil of the system, that's how it's supposed to work.
On the other hand, you can do away with the patent system out of some commune living ideal and you'll watch Pfizer immediately close its R&D doors along with everyone else. Oh, they won't go out of business, they'll just keep making all the existing unpatented drugs, finding ways to make them cheaper. And you will have turned the entire pharmaceutical industry into the equivalent of McDonald's versus Burger King, where it's only about cheap additives, supply chains and brand marketing.
Why the hell would we want to do that? I'm a social liberal, but I'm a realist first. There is a reason Russia wasn't an invention powerhouse under Communism. It's the same reason China's Great Leap Forward was the largest genocide in the history of mankind.
The question is, can a government agency or anyone else call up Apple or a carrier and have them remotely activate CarrierIQ on the iPhone?
I don't care if it's "off by default". I care if it's "controlled by the user". There's a clear and concise distinction, and Apple's track record does not lead me to believe that Apple doesn't have absolute control to remotely activate this or any other setting at their discretion. Even if they were unable to before, they may have added that remote capability since they've lost several phones before.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC
Steve Jobs also famously said that the people don't know what they want until it is shown to them. He spoke of Henry Ford, saying that if he had asked what people wanted before the automotive revolution, they'd say a faster horse.
I don't believe people don't want to program. In fact, they absolutely do want to program. They just don't want to learn a programming language to do it. Natural language programming and learned skillsets are how we teach children. Few people want to use a calendar, but you can talk to Siri, and it interfaces for you. Few people want to work spreadsheets, but Mint.com does all of the calculations for you.
People want to be in control. They just want that control to conform to their natural skill sets, not new obscure skill sets.
I can't honestly comprehend what the use of hacking the UN is. First, it can do little except what the majority of nations or the Security Council tells it to do, and of that, there is not much. Second, agree with it or not, it is what it is. Hacking it, shaming it, or protesting it doesn't do anything but make it even less effective.
It's not as though they can change, as they have no real power to begin with. And it's not as though there is an alternative. For instance, we might think doing away with lifetime veto memberships might be a good thing, but that is never going to happen. Such nations are not going to pretend they are equal with all other nations.
At least the current UN structure recognizes that world powers exist, and their power needs a diplomatic equivalent.
I'm not defending the UN, but hell, it's all we got, people!
Negativity is always more powerful than positivity on positions. What plus only systems do, such as on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is rank things purely on their positive ratings, though Twitter's ranking is obscured through the Trending Topics system.
Plus only systems don't let anyone actively destroy content, but simply choose to promote or not. Slashdot could use the same system using uncapped mod points per post, and allowing to see top X posts, instead of setting which score to see. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that only random users can mod.
You underestimate how little money companies are prepared to save by betraying their countries.
You underestimate how well placed bribes and rarely enforced regulations save companies money. For instance, I've heard no outcry in China about Foxconn suicides. The government largely waved its hand over it and stated that young workers have mental problems unrelated to their jobs. But the real headlines was that Apple sent Tim Cook to investigate because it was bad PR.
It's not just the wages that are low. The workers themselves are largely expendable. Or do you really believe no child labor went into your electronic devices?
If you don't want your search results filtered by US, use Yandex or alternatively Baidu.
Yes, if you rather have your search results filtered by Russia or China. Yeah, communist shadow filtering where you can't see the invisible hand hiding sites is SO much better than most US court filtering that are open enough to actually be published, and not themselves censored.
Yandex and Baidu are completely independant search engines.
Maybe on Bizarro World, not on Earth. Independent from aggregate results of other engines, but not independent from censorship. Baidu might possibly the most heavily filtered site on the planet.
Facebook is still subject to national jurisdictions, and trademark law still restricts what Facebook is allowed to do with its own domain. Perhaps the most legally justifiable answer might be to geolocate the IP address, find the correct trademark owner for a given country, and then redirect to MSD's or EMD's Facebook page as appropriate.
Actually, the most legally justifiable answer is exactly what they did in taking it down. Possibly breaking their entire system for a work around might also be legally justifiable, except that it provides no solution for countries other than the US and Germany. What about Italy, is the German company or the US company recognized there or in the EU. What about Japan or Canada, for instance. What about IPs that can't be resolved?
Even if all that was solved, it still breaks the system. If someone in the US likes the page, and someone in the EU reads that and clicks the link, they will go to the wrong page. It may seem inconsequential, but it breaks any kind of trust model for URIs, even if that trust model is superficial.
Better to just tell both companies to piss off and/or change their names to their full corporate names or locations, i.e. facebook.com/MerckUSA
Slashdot Mirror
Psychologist's statistical study suggesting that psychologists have possible psychological issues with sharing their psychological studies... perhaps this warrants a further psychological study of said psychologists?
Go get Spiceworks, and it will do 99% of your requests for you.
You're welcome.
"A little over a month ago, I assumed the position of programmer and sole IT personnel at a thriving e-commerce company."
I'm sorry, repeat that again?
"A little over a month ago, I assumed the position of programmer and sole IT personnel at a thriving e-commerce company"
No offense, but you should leave NOW! A "thriving e-commerce company" with only one person in IT? Really? You are working for a Mickey Mouse operation. It's most likely run by sales, and sales doesn't give a damn what you do or how you do it or the problems caused for you. Those band aids? Sales requested each and every one of them! Leave now. Leave fast!
Sabotage is also a French word - throwing shoes into the machinery.
I believe retreat and surrender have similar origins.
I think these lock in deals are going to fade away. Google is most happy when users have a choice, much like they get when Chrome is first installed. The reason is that most people given a choice will choose Google. I think the money Google saves not helping Firefox is worth any potential lost business to Bing even if Firefox makes them default. Of course, this will only alienate more Firefox users.
I'm not saying that what you say is impossible, but it is not very feasible unless you have a very special setup which few companies actually have. In most cases, someone ultimately has the keys to the kingdom. The best most can do is restrict this to as few as possible.
Encrypted DB's won't stop a DBA. The reason is that if you fire an employee, someone has to revoke keys and assign new ones. Someone with the authority to revoke and assign keys can view anything they want, anytime they want.
The only method that is possible is where 2 or more people are needed to use their key to access the information. If you have 3 security IT people, you need to create a situation where at least 2 are needed to unlock something.
And let's not overlook the fact that such systems are not usually set up and audited by a 3rd party.
It's not that they are doing it wrong, it's that without a 3rd party setting up the system you can't have that kind of security at all. The best setup would even require that a 3rd party become the key authority, yet have no direct access to company data whatsoever, and only hand over keys directly to the personnel they are assigned to.
Still, does this stop a determined administrator who disabled AV and installs a key logger on a workstation? No. Granted, that's probably criminal, and at least the 3rd party + dual key authentication system stops casual data breaches.
Most businesses don't have a budget for such things. They take the view, and I'm inclined to agree, that if you don't trust staff who have high level access, you shouldn't have hired them in the first place. As someone who people bring in personal laptops in to fix on occasion, most users are aware that I can see everything on their machine. It's not that I can look that worries them, but that I'll keep my mouth shut if I do happen to see something. I was told in no uncertain terms recently, that a laptop was brimming with porn. But, they trusted that I would not be sending out a company memo entitled, "Looky what I found on X's laptop!"
Businesses often feel the same way. Casual breaches do happen as part of authorized work. For instance, if a payroll file becomes corrupted, I'd have to look at the file. They just want you to shut up about what you see and/or forget what you saw. That's what they mean by trusted. Like any trusted friend, it's not about what secrets you know, but what secrets you can be relied upon to keep.
In a previous post, people were saying that mixing biology and computer science was a stupid idea, here. However, this clearly shows that is much needed, except that in this case, the computer geeks can help out the biology nerds.
'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.'
No. This doesn't modify contracts. But in the US, most hourly paid jobs are required by law to pay 1.5 x rate of pay for work over 40 hours in a single week. This would remove that requirement for some workers.
What that means is that employers are no obligated to pay "time and a half" over 40 hours if they don't want to. They would have to under existing contracts, but they could refuse to include this requirement under new contracts.
However, because overtime pay is so standardized, there is most likely many existing contracts that don't include its own provisions. Union contracts do, simply because they have no trust in labor law. But many non-union contracts were originally negotiated with the impression that mandatory overtime pay was simply an unchanging fact of US labor law.
And if the law changes, those workers could immediately lose overtime benefits.
This means less tax revenue but not through any kind of tax cut. It should start a firestorm the moment someone asks how the lost tax revenue will be "paid for", meaning what program will be cut.
This is a lose-lose for everyone. Workers lose money, government loses money, and businesses that will find negotiating with IT unions much harder than negotiating one on one.
It's not just lack of rationale, it's anti-rationale because it goes against everyone's interests in the end.
Yeah, good luck to them getting anyone one to work on Senator's computers ever again. Email, internet, and computers frequently have problems. Nobody has to crash them... we just don't have to fix them once they do. A day without IT can be a real bitch, just like some Senators.
"Ah, gee, Senator. My shift ended at 5pm and I don't do overtime. Call back tomorrow between 8 and 5pm."
I'd have found a brave, attractive woman to just show her tits at the meeting and say, "There you go, you've all seen tits. Now let's move on and get some free internet."
They created something truly devious in the game over trojan. We all just lost.
Lets not forget that it was approved by a slashdot editor as well. This is yet another of many reasons why I don't bother logging in anymore.
Just an idea, but comments are the property of the submitter, and the host is not responsible, at least in most countries. Possibly this system arose to protect Slashdot from copyright lawsuits from the stories it posts the way that Google News was attacked.
...when researchers fed unaltered pictures of Michael Jackson into the system. The system determined that not only were the later pictures manipulated, but that there was only a 0.01% probability that they were even based on the original.
... Satan says he was coerced into making a statement by an overzealous detective.
"Pfizer is employing unprecedented tactics to hold onto as many Lipitor prescriptions as it can with an aggressive marketing plan and forging deals with insurers, pharmacy benefit managers and patients to meet or beat the price of its generic replacements because even at the lower price, Pfizer has a huge profit margin because of the relatively low cost of materials for Lipitor."
Oh, the humanity! They're going to make a life saving drug cheaper than even generics! How dare they! And they even plan to keep making a profit while doing it!
My ass. you grant a monopoly to someone. That someone gets big on that monopoly.
Well, yeah? You think they spend billions making drugs so that a company who spent nothing can start churning it out a week later? Of course it's a monopoly! That's the point. But it's a temporary one.
This story isn't an example of why patents are bad. This just shows what happens under ANY patent system, and that its a good thing. We can argue the length of patents or what can be patented, but the idea of a patent itself is pretty much common sense. If you truly invent something, you get the right to own it for a certain period of time. You can charge what you want, sell it how you want, license it if you want, or do nothing with it at all if you so choose.
This simply shows that once that time runs out, you only have the advantage of the business you previously created around that patent. Prices are naturally going to fall because you now have competition. There is a reward for being the inventor, and there is a reward for letting the patent expire. That's a great setup, if you ask me. Sure, that means cutting edge drugs are expensive. But so are cutting edge phones, computers, cars, houses, etc. That's the way life works on this planet. If you do away with the systems that make the cutting edge expensive, you do away with the cutting edge almost all together. Then, you are going back to the days where inventors and artists needed rich, private benefactors who mostly wanted to keep that work private.
This story is not the evil of the system, that's how it's supposed to work.
On the other hand, you can do away with the patent system out of some commune living ideal and you'll watch Pfizer immediately close its R&D doors along with everyone else. Oh, they won't go out of business, they'll just keep making all the existing unpatented drugs, finding ways to make them cheaper. And you will have turned the entire pharmaceutical industry into the equivalent of McDonald's versus Burger King, where it's only about cheap additives, supply chains and brand marketing.
Why the hell would we want to do that? I'm a social liberal, but I'm a realist first. There is a reason Russia wasn't an invention powerhouse under Communism. It's the same reason China's Great Leap Forward was the largest genocide in the history of mankind.
...career as a judge in Italy, Captain Obvious will be running for political office. And there was singing and dancing in the streets of Italy!
The question is, can a government agency or anyone else call up Apple or a carrier and have them remotely activate CarrierIQ on the iPhone?
I don't care if it's "off by default". I care if it's "controlled by the user". There's a clear and concise distinction, and Apple's track record does not lead me to believe that Apple doesn't have absolute control to remotely activate this or any other setting at their discretion. Even if they were unable to before, they may have added that remote capability since they've lost several phones before.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC
Steve Jobs also famously said that the people don't know what they want until it is shown to them. He spoke of Henry Ford, saying that if he had asked what people wanted before the automotive revolution, they'd say a faster horse.
I don't believe people don't want to program. In fact, they absolutely do want to program. They just don't want to learn a programming language to do it. Natural language programming and learned skillsets are how we teach children. Few people want to use a calendar, but you can talk to Siri, and it interfaces for you. Few people want to work spreadsheets, but Mint.com does all of the calculations for you.
People want to be in control. They just want that control to conform to their natural skill sets, not new obscure skill sets.
I can't honestly comprehend what the use of hacking the UN is. First, it can do little except what the majority of nations or the Security Council tells it to do, and of that, there is not much. Second, agree with it or not, it is what it is. Hacking it, shaming it, or protesting it doesn't do anything but make it even less effective.
It's not as though they can change, as they have no real power to begin with. And it's not as though there is an alternative. For instance, we might think doing away with lifetime veto memberships might be a good thing, but that is never going to happen. Such nations are not going to pretend they are equal with all other nations.
At least the current UN structure recognizes that world powers exist, and their power needs a diplomatic equivalent.
I'm not defending the UN, but hell, it's all we got, people!
Negativity is always more powerful than positivity on positions. What plus only systems do, such as on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is rank things purely on their positive ratings, though Twitter's ranking is obscured through the Trending Topics system.
Plus only systems don't let anyone actively destroy content, but simply choose to promote or not. Slashdot could use the same system using uncapped mod points per post, and allowing to see top X posts, instead of setting which score to see. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that only random users can mod.
You underestimate how little money companies are prepared to save by betraying their countries.
You underestimate how well placed bribes and rarely enforced regulations save companies money. For instance, I've heard no outcry in China about Foxconn suicides. The government largely waved its hand over it and stated that young workers have mental problems unrelated to their jobs. But the real headlines was that Apple sent Tim Cook to investigate because it was bad PR.
It's not just the wages that are low. The workers themselves are largely expendable. Or do you really believe no child labor went into your electronic devices?
If you don't want your search results filtered by US, use Yandex or alternatively Baidu.
Yes, if you rather have your search results filtered by Russia or China. Yeah, communist shadow filtering where you can't see the invisible hand hiding sites is SO much better than most US court filtering that are open enough to actually be published, and not themselves censored.
Yandex and Baidu are completely independant search engines.
Maybe on Bizarro World, not on Earth. Independent from aggregate results of other engines, but not independent from censorship. Baidu might possibly the most heavily filtered site on the planet.
Facebook is still subject to national jurisdictions, and trademark law still restricts what Facebook is allowed to do with its own domain. Perhaps the most legally justifiable answer might be to geolocate the IP address, find the correct trademark owner for a given country, and then redirect to MSD's or EMD's Facebook page as appropriate.
Actually, the most legally justifiable answer is exactly what they did in taking it down. Possibly breaking their entire system for a work around might also be legally justifiable, except that it provides no solution for countries other than the US and Germany. What about Italy, is the German company or the US company recognized there or in the EU. What about Japan or Canada, for instance. What about IPs that can't be resolved?
Even if all that was solved, it still breaks the system. If someone in the US likes the page, and someone in the EU reads that and clicks the link, they will go to the wrong page. It may seem inconsequential, but it breaks any kind of trust model for URIs, even if that trust model is superficial.
Better to just tell both companies to piss off and/or change their names to their full corporate names or locations, i.e. facebook.com/MerckUSA